By peter oluka
Unwillingness of telecommunications companies in Nigeria to perform basic pre-deployment RF engineering before going commercial contributes significantly to the persistent poor quality of service (QoS), according to Enextgen Wireless Ltd.
To address the challenge, the Company has called on the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) and the network service providers, to leverage on its National Independent Wireless Broadband Quality Reporting (NIWBQR); for realistic reports on national broadband quality of experience in mobile wireless communication services in the country.
Mr. Aderemi Adeyeye, president, Enext Wireless Inc., said that close to two years, the Company has been using its proprietary methods to rank service providers according to the quality of mobile wireless broadband service experienced in their networks, adding that experience has shown some terrible engineering mistakes during deployment as contributory to the poor quality of service experienced by telecom consumers.
Adeyeye told Nigeria CommunicationsWeek that there are basic things the operators should do which, “in my view, do not require so much innovations rather basic engineering”.
“If you deploy a network, the cell sites have to talk each other. When someone wants to maintain data transfer while moving from one area of the network to another, the network has to be aware of such movement and allow the data transfer to continue without disruption.
“Specifically, with regards quality of service in Nigeria, our observation is that the quality of deployment in Nigeria is very poor. How bad? It varies from a service provider to the other.
“Nevertheless, there is a specific service provider that seems very aggressive in providing quality LTE deployment and akin to deploy services nationwide. Meanwhile, this service provider, in some areas, has some major issues such as connection failure and drops. Overall, their network is good.
“The quality of deployment of some smaller service provider is so bad that nowhere in the world, except in this clime would a service provider will be allowed to deploy that kind of network to the public.”
Mr. Kola Olaosebikan, managing director of Enextgen Wireless Ltd, nodding in agreement bemoaned that the service providers haven’t taken issues around technical competencies cum engineering very seriously.
“Now, if the consumers are not happy, it implies the service providers are not proficient in some areas. This time, the engineering; they need to optimise their networks regularly. This is what the NIWBQR recognises. For instance, when we conducted the latest study, we have detailed analyses showing why they have issues such as drop calls, connection failures etc. But most of the service providers depend on a single vendor to help them end-to-end. Sometimes, it is difficult getting them to buy into the idea of the report”, he said.
