NCC decries telecoms firms quality of service

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), yesterday in Abuja charged telecommunications firms in the country to improve their quality of service in the interest of consumers and sustained service delivery by industry players.

The telecoms regulatory body told the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) after their meeting that it was important to review the quality of their services as the commission would ensure that the environment is conducive for them to operate adequately.

Going forward, the commission would ensure stricter monitoring and adherence to key performance indicators (KPIs) earlier specified to the operators, which are expected to improve service delivery.

Failure of the service providers to meet the performance indices would be met with stricter sanctions, the NCC said. In the past six months, mobile telephone users in the country have been subjected to poor quality service ranging from drop calls, call set up failure, poor call retention, weak signals, fluctuations, cross talks, echo back, unsolicited text messages, and consistent but unsolicited tele-marketing, among others.

Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, had warned that operators risk losing subscribers if they fail to improve their services.He told The Guardian in an interview that: “I want to assure you that government is concerned about quality of service to the consumers. We will continue to work on all the network providers to improve. I have had cause to read the riot act to them. It must, however, be a case of carrot and the stick because we know that the circumstances under which they are operating are also not particularly favourable. For instance, electricity has remained a challenge. But the President Muhammad Buhari’s government is working on all that.”

Meanwhile, to cushion the effect of poor services and scarcity of foreign exchange for roll out of infrastructure, Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, told the operators that the commission had written to the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, and he was favourably disposed to addressing their forex needs.

Specifically, as a follow up to the letter, Executive Commissioner (Stakeholders Management), NCC, Sunday Dare, had a meeting with Emefiele and extracted a commitment from him on how to address the forex needs of the operators.