WHEN ‘THE NETWORK CANNOT BE REACHED’  

The regulator should be alive to its responsibility     

It is unfortunate that Nigerians have continued to experience poor service quality from the telcos despite spending trillions of Naira annually on airtime. Since these industrial glitches have subsisted even with repeated promises to address them by the operators, we urge the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to be more alive to their regulatory responsibility of enforcing compliance in the sector. The NCC should also address some challenges which the telcos have highlighted as being responsible for the regime of poor service quality, especially in the rural areas of the country.    

The mobile telecommunications sector has grown to become a very important contributor to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The sector has expanded the broadband, internet penetration and most importantly, subscriber base in the country. Recent market figures reveal that there are over 172 million mobile subscribers on all the networks in Nigeria, accounting for a penetration rate of 87 per cent of the population. Unfortunately, due to a combination of factors, subscribers are experiencing poor service quality. Nigeria is being ranked poorly on all global indices regarding telecoms services at a time the companies are raking in scandalous profits. In its 2022 financial report, MTN declared N2 trillion in revenue and posted an operating profit of N733.3 billion. Airtel Nigeria also raked in the sum of N980 billion, which represents a 20.3 per cent year-on-year (YoY) growth on its 2021’s N864.9 billion.    

Key among the subscribers’ complaints are connection failures, poor data service, fluctuating network, data roll over challenges, illegal credit deductions and uncompleted calls. The drop in service quality has been attributed to the fact that some of the mobile network operators have failed to meet the industry standards for service delivery in the affected states. According to industry data, telcos fell short of the four major key performance indicators: dropped call rate, call set up rate, stand-alone dedicated control channel congestion rate and traffic control channel congestion rate.    

Operators have always blamed poor infrastructure in the country characterised by inadequate power generation and supply as one of the reasons for the atrocious quality recorded in the sector. They have at different times complained about road constructions and repairs leading to cable cuts, vandalism of equipment, and other security issues. They also cite multiple taxation, cost of maintaining equipment, etc., as huge responsibilities. But all these are no excuses as they are normal business risks. In any case, if all these problems have not prevented them from making huge profits why should they be excuses for poor service delivery?    

We task NCC to continue to collaborate with the relevant agencies to ensure adequate security for telecoms facilities and engage stakeholders on the need to protect telecommunications infrastructure. The sector will continue to grapple with poor service delivery if criminal elements are not stopped from tampering with telecoms infrastructure across the country. We also call on the federal government to urgently address the challenge of low broadband penetration.    

Above all, the message from the NCC to the operators should be clear: It is not just about increasing subscriber numbers but that there should be a commensurate increase in the quality of service they provide. Making a simple voice call has become a problem and holding a brief conversation has become even more problematic. The current level of frustration characterised by high rate of dropped calls, high rate of call attempts, call interference, loss of audio and recurrent down times, have therefore become unacceptable. Nigerians are tired of constant promises from the stable of operators on what they plan to do on the improvement of quality on their networks. They want concrete action.