By Prince Osuagwu

The Nigerian telecommunications sector has continued to experience substantial growth yearly. With almost 180 million active mobile lines by the end of 2019, Nigeria has retains the largest telecommunications sector in Africa in terms of subscriber numbers and one of the fastest growing telecommunications markets in the world.

However, a corollary to this remarkable growth has been persistent consumer dissatisfaction with the quality of telecommunications services offered by the four existing GSM mobile telecommunications operators.

Consistently the regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC among other measures, has penalised the telcos over the issue, yet it remained a recurrent decimal. Although subscribers have attributed these quality of service problems to inefficiencies in the operational activities of the operators, the telcos have in turn blamed it on peculiar features of the Nigerian environment in which they operate.

For instance, at a recent public hearing by joint senate committee on communications; and trade and investments on the increasing rate of drop calls and other unwholesome practices by telecommunications network operators in Nigeria, Chairman of the Association of Licensed Telecom Operators in Nigeria, ALTON, Engr Gbenga Adebayo, said that the quality of service provision all over the world is influenced by the operating environment hence there is need to know that telco’s operation will be impacted one way or the other by the environment.

He said:  “As with every other sector of the economy, the telecommunications sector has its own peculiar challenges  which impact on the ability of Operators to deliver seamless services to customers”

He listed the challenges to include: various forms of Infrastructure damage

which usually lead to sudden outages or poor Quality of Service (QoS).

According to him, “a typical scenario is a situation where hoodlums break into a site, kill or injure the guard on duty and cart away valuable equipment such as the power generating sets, BTS equipment and Air Conditioners among other things. This immediately leads to network outages in the area covered by the vandalized facility. In addition to this, neighbouring BTS sites will then come under excess pressure as they are made to bear more call and data traffic due to the outage on the looted site. Besides vandalism, other causes of infrastructure damage include natural disasters such as floods. Road construction across the country also leads to indiscriminate cutting of fiber cables laid beside the roads. This also impacts QoS, leading to drop calls among others. Damages to telecommunications infrastructure cost millions to restore thereby eroding resources that could have been deployed to network expansion and maintenance”.

He also highlighted issues of bombed sites due to insurgent activities, illegal sites lock-outs by several agencies of government or community leaders, hindering adequate services on those sites, lack of statutory permits for infrastructure roll-out, Unstable Power Supply and use of sub-standard mobile devices by subscribers, among other factors.

As a result, the telcos challenge the federal government to list telecom facilities among the critical national infrastructure to accord them a better protection.

Despite all these explanations, the issue of Quality of service, is often one that the NCC has always been criticized for not tackling well.

However, the commission has said that through effective collaboration of all stakeholders and thorough monitoring of compliance to existing regulations, it will help improve overall QoS delivery to consumers.

It added that since network capacity constraints is identified as major source of poor performance, the NCC has mandated and received network expansion plans from all the operators for  the year 2020 and will monitor strict compliance and implementation.

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Meanwhile, a peep into the commission’s activities revealed several measures it has taken to tackle this hydra-headed telecom sector challenge.

These include:

*Monthly engagement sessions with operators on QoS. These engagement sessions assess the monthly QoS Key performance indicators (KPI) of operators, identify areas of challenges, gets feedback of previously identified shortcomings from operators, assess progress made, and set deliverables for next engagement session.

*Quarterly QoS Industry working group meeting: engagement with operators, vendors, and collocation service providers to assess QoS performance as an industry. Identify licensees underperforming and set targets for all licensees. Areas of challenges facing licensees are also identified and NCC areas of support are identified. Areas that government need to intervene are also identified. These include areas like theft of telecom equipments on site, vandalisation of equipments, illegal site shutdown by government agencies and communities.

*Engagement with Nigerian Governors forum to align right of way charges in line with that agreed at the National Economic Concil resolution. This will enable widespread rollout of telecom infrastructure.

*Engagement with individual governors to reduce and eliminate the incidences of site shutdown by state government agencies.

*Instituted new QoS measurement mechanisms for assessing the QoS performance of operators to ensure measured performance more closely aligns with subscriber experiences across all states of the federation

*Instituted measurement and QoS performance assessment of collocation service providers and ISPs. This ensured that all players in the telecom value chain had their QoS performance assessed and ensures there is an added incentive to provide optimal performance at all times.

*Instituted measurement of 3G QoS performance in line with expansion of 3G services across the country.

*Deployed QoS measurement systems at the commission to enable near real time assessment of QoS across the country from the Commissions office.

*Assessment of likely QoS impact of promos on operators’ networks before approval can be granted. Promos approval is denied if QoS impact is assessed to be negative.

*Institution of mobile number portability (MNP) scheme to create an incentive for operators to invest in their networks and provide offerings aimed at attracting subscribers of other networks to theirs. Subscribers are also able to seamlessly move out of any network they are unsatisfied with its QoS delivery into a network that provides better QoS.

*Instituted benchmarking drive test across the country to measure performance of each operator in a given area and identify coverage gaps with a view to bridging them.

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