ATCON Boss Says Substandard Equipment Responsible for Poor QoS

Lanre Ajayi, president, Association of Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ATCON) has attributed the poor quality of services provisioning by telecoms firms in the country to the proliferation of substandard equipment used by service providers.

According to him, outsourcing could get sour when cheap vendors were engaged as they would always sell cheap products.

He, however, described the outsourcing and managed services model as a good development for the telecoms industry as it focused on making the operators to concentrate on their areas of core competencies.

Ajayi said “outsourcing engineering services cannot be faulted, but the concern is about the competence levels of the companies being outsourced to. Are they really qualified for the jobs?”

The ATCON boss further explained: “Most of the companies engaged are foreign and some indigenous companies that have the competences are not happy. They feel they should be patronised. I think we should start to address this. The Federal Government should come up with a local content law as is the case in the oil sector. There must be an enabling policy framework.”

Recent investigations revealed that some of the service providers were patronising equipment vendors that offered cheaper prices, as against those with more expensive but qualitative equipment.

The dwindling revenue streams and diminishing capital outlay in the industry, it was learnt, are putting huge pressure on the firms to drive down their cost of operation by all means.

The patronage of cheaper equipment vendors, it was also gathered, had huge implications on the overall engineering cost, which was a significant cost for the telecoms operators.

Owing to the successful deployment of the cheap set of equipment and the accompanying short-term benefits, operators that had yet to adopt the model were fast considering it.

Nearly all the firms engaged by the operators are foreign vendors. Some players in the industry recently expressed their displeasure over the engagement of some of the foreign vendors they described as “less competent,” Ajayi said.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) recently expressed worry over the abuse of terms of contracts between the telecommunications companies and their vendors, which has led to the defrauding of third-party partners including the governments in the form of tax payment.