Telecommunications subscribers in the country have asked the government to invest the fines imposed on telecom service providers in the provision of more telecom infrastructure to arrest the worsening quality of service provisioning.
Service providers have failed to provide quality service despite having paid over N1.7 billion fines in the last two years for failing to meet Nigerian Communications Commission’s (NCC) minimum standard, including the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
As a result subscribers have continued to suffer from poor quality of service ranging from incessant drop calls, poor voice clarity, inability to make successful calls, to inability to recharge phones among others.
Deolu Ogunbanjo, national president, National Association of Telecommunications Subscribers (NATCOMS), said that services will keep falling because government has not done the needful.
“Unfortunately, NCC is not doing the needful. Sanctioning or imposing fines on operators without investing the money in the provisioning of telecom infrastructure such as building of additional base stations and so on will not solve the problem of poor quality of service” he added.
Dr. Omobola Johnson, minister of Communications Technology while agreeing that there was short fall in the quality of services provided by the operators, however, enjoined the operators to increase the number of installed infrastructure as a way to address the issue.
“There is a link between infrastructure and quality of service, but most people do not understand this. We do not have enough telecoms infrastructure in the country.” She stated during a recent visit to Lagos.
According to her, the 25,000 base stations currently spread across the country are serving over 130 million subscribers and are not enough.
“Since the infrastructure is not enough, we therefore need more of it and operators should not be discouraged from building additional infrastructure.”
Nodding in agreement, Dr. Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman, NCC, decried the low infrastructure build out.
Juwah said that in Abuja, the nation’s capital for instance, that there is no additional infrastructure in the last seven years.
Defending the operators, Akinwale Goodluck, corporate services executive, MTN Nigeria, noted that no network sets out to provide poor quality of service (QoS) as most service disruptions are caused by challenges beyond the control of service providers.
Goodluck, who spoke at a recent Telecoms Consumer Parliament of the NCC, said that strong winds and heavy rainfall in 2014 have resulted in a disruption of service to a large number of subscribers across the country.
He said the closure of Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) of service providers by some state governments in a bid to collect rents and levies also contributed to the poor quality of service being experienced by subscribers.
Saleh Odeh, a telecom subscriber, expressed sadness at the blame game and urged the government to come up with policies that will compel operators to provide acceptable level of services or be severely punished.