Calls to decentralize clearing circuits for improved QoS, reduced cost

IKE Nnamani, chief executive officer, Medallion, a telecommunications voice clearing house operator has canvassed for the decentralization of clearing circuits in the country to improve quality of service provisioning and reducedcost.

He told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek, that presently, clearing circuits are located in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt which means that across network calls which pass through interconnect infrastructure are meant to travel a long distance before its termination point even when the termination point is few miles away from the originating point.

“The situation now is that if a subscriber in Enugu wants to call another person in the same environ on another network, that call will have to travel to Lagos where the interconnect circuit is located before coming back to Enugu again in this process the quality of such call will be affected by issues on the switches and microwave links along this process. But, if the interconnect circuit is located in Enugu or closer to Enugu, there is no need for such travel there by reducing interference and improve call quality and cost for the operator which are in turn passed to the subscribers,” he said.

He said against this backdrop that his company has concluded plans to build its interconnect circuits in six geopolitical zones of the country by first quarter of next year while urging other operators to do same for the benefits to be felt.

Engr. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman, Association Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (ALTON) said that decentralization of interconnect circuits are necessary where calls are linked through microwave or satellite technology.

“Presently, most long distance calls are routed through fibre optic backbone links which travels at the speed of light and does not have quality of service issues or high cost in transmission, except where there is a problem on the fibre link that calls are links via microwave. It is only when calls are linked via microwave which today we see within towns where there are no fibre links.

For instance, calls from first mile which is point of origination to the nearest switching centre to last mile which is last switching centre to the point of recipient that are often done via microwave. This is the reason we are calling for protection of telecommunications infrastructure, some of the fibre optic links are vandalized resulting to operators using microwave technology that is affected by interference and other issues,” he said.

It would be recalled that Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in 2012 licensed interconnect clearing houses to provide and operate Interconnect Exchange Services to the telecommunications Operators, by so doing address the issue of indebtedness in the sector after big operators where denying smaller operators interconnection to their network as a result of debts owe to them.

The take-off of interconnect clearing house which provided the platform for sorting out of monies due to each operator and period of settlement helped to address that indebtedness.