In a bid to have a substainable quality of service in the Nigerian telecom industry, the Industry Consumer Advisory Forum (ICAF) has urged stakeholders in the industry to collaborate with the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).
This collaboration, the Forum believes will collectively contribute towards improving the Quality of Service (QoS) delivery by MNOs in the country at the federal, state and local levels.
Making a presentation at its first quarter 2020 meeting held in Abuja last week, ICAF noted that the challenge of poor QoS in the telecom industry is an issue that requires collaborative efforts of the National Assembly as well as state and local governments, to tackle.
“There need to be a collaboration between stakeholders in the industry and the NCC. The collaboration is both urgent and necessary because telecoms has long migrated from being a mere enabler of communication, to an industry that has become widely acknowledged as being the most important enabler of socio-economic activities in contemporary society,” the advocacy group noted.
ICAF however listed some challenges that impact on the ability of telecoms operators to deliver seamless services to customers. The challenges, according to ICAF include infrastructure damage, bombed sites due to insurgent activities, illegal site lock-outs, unstable power supply and prolonged power outage, denial of statutory permits for infrastructure roll-out, high cost of Right of Way (RoW), and use of substandard devices by the consumers, among others.
ICAF recalled that at the onset of the insurgency in the North-East region, operators were also at the receiving end of the destruction that was visited on the infrastructure in the region. He cited Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states as areas where hundreds of BTS sites were either bombed or affected due to dependence on a bombed site. Such vandalism resulted in loss of coverage in so many places including Dikwa, Gamboru, Monguno, Bama, Konduga and Damaturu.
“Operators have been able to restore a lot of these sites, while restoration at other facilities are still pending due to security concerns. In some cases those that were restored have been bombed again, but efforts are currently ongoing in collaboration with agencies in the security services and state governments, to secure sites,” ICAF noted in the presentation. It also assured participants that “with these efforts it is hoped that there will be noticeable improvement in coverage, leading to reduced dropped calls in the affected areas.”
The presentation further explained that the failure of some governmental authorities and their subsidiary agencies to grant the statutory approvals required by operators to build more sites is another problem. ICAF affirmed that “as the existing infrastructure get to full capacity, operators need to build more facilities to accommodate excess call, SMS, data and Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) traffic. Unfortunately, in the past seven years, the FCT Administration, in particular, has not granted approvals for telecommunications sites to be built in the Territory.”