The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has mandated telecom licensees in Nigeria to give subscribers one-week advance notice if they have plans to disrupt services.
In a statement signed by Mrs. Nnenna Ukoha, Ag. Head of Public Affairs at the commission, the NCC also stated that the service providers must inform consumers of major service outages on their networks through media channels, stating the cause(s) of the service interruption, and the area(s) affected by the service interruption/outage, as well as the time that would be taken to restore service.
This development, contained in the “Directive on Reportage of Major Network Outages by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs),” is part of the Commission’s drive to ensure timely resolution of outages, enhance the quality of experience for telecom consumers, and keep consumers informed.
According to the Directive, Mobile Network Operators, Internet Service Providers and other operators that provide last-mile services will also provide proportional compensation, including extension of validity, as may be applicable and in line with the provisions of the Consumer Code of Practice Regulations, where any major network outage continues for more than 24 hours.
The statement said the directive identified three types of major outages to include any network operational conditions such as fibre cut due to construction/access issues/theft & vandalism and force majeure that impacts five per cent or more of the affected operator’s subscriber base or five or more Local Government Areas (LGAs); having an occasion of unplanned outage of, or complete isolation of network resources in 100 or more sites or five per cent of the total number of sites (whichever is less) or 1 cluster that lasts for 30 minutes or more; and lastly, any form of outage that can degrade network quality in the top 10 states based on traffic volume as specified by the Commission from time to time.
In furtherance of this, the Commission has further directed that all Major Outages are to be reported by operators through the Commision’s Major Outage Reporting Portal, which is accessible to the public through the Commission’s website, www.ncc.gov.ng. The portal additionally discloses the identity of the culprit responsible for the disruption.