Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) has accused some big mobile operators in the country of being noncommittal towards the successful review of the 2009 Interconnection Rates whose new final draft report was recently released in Lagos last week.
Dr. Eugene Juwah, executive vice chairman and CEO of the NCC said some of the big operators were nonchalant when asked to submit data on their networks.
“The Commission however would like to express its displeasure by some of the big operators who were not very cooperative in the course of the collection of these data,” said Juwah.
Subsequently, he stated the Commission’s “consultants had to apply international benchmarked figures to populate the cost models in those instances.”
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) that carried out the review also said they resorted to the international benchmark model to beat deadline given for submission of their findings.
Alastair Macpherson, partner, strategy consulting PwC while reacting to some operators on their use of a hypothetical operator in the report’s evaluation, said it was not meant to depict actual operator.
“Hypothetical operator doesn’t represent any (real) operator. It only shows level of termination regimes in an operation.”
Macpherson noted that in a “natural equilibrium of the telecom market, some operators will survive while some others will go under according to market indicators.”
Juwah assured some skeptical operators that the report was not cast in iron as they were given a week to study the PwC report and make necessary recommendation before the final document is released for implementation.
The process for review of the 2009 interconnection rate for voice services began with an initial industry stakeholder’s forum in July 2012. Following that was another process of industry statistical data collection, analysis and population into the costs models.
The PwC final draft report was subsequently released and reviewed to industry operators and other stakeholders’ in Lagos last week.