That Move to Address QoS Provisioning

In the rush to expand and chalk up more subscribers, some telecommunications service providers in the country overlook the quality of service provisioning and the result is the widespread below the par offerings.
The issue of poor quality of service has become a recurring decimal and efforts in the past to address have yielded little result.
There are now more dropped calls, incorrect billing and in some cases, service unavailability. Sometimes, the operators do not even have the courtesies of apologizing for the poor services rendered.
Reasons for poor quality of service include; unchecked rollout of services to different communities and towns without commensurate base stations and cell sites to service the communities.
Also, the country’s notoriously unreliable power supply and increased vandalisation of telecom equipment have not helped matters.
Piqued by the situation, Dora Akunyili, minister of Information and Communications in June barked out and ordered the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) to submit a comprehensive plan of action on how to improve quality of service.
The apex regulatory body of the telecommunications industry was given two weeks but in the absence of a substantive chief executive, the commission waited till last week to indicate its readiness to confront the ugly situation.
Dr. Eugene Juwah, chief executive officer of the NCC said that the issue of addressing the quality of services being rendered by the various networks is a matter of urgency to the Commission.
According to him, the commission will intensify efforts to ensure that the quality of services being delivered to the consumers is acceptable.
“We want the operators to continue to do only those things that will improve the quality of services and discontinue those that degrade the quality’ he said
He said that the commission has set up a task force at the Commission to come up with short, medium and long term solutions on the issues of QoS.
Juwah said that the commission will seek the cooperation and collaboration of telecom companies to find lasting solutions to the issues.
Though the NCC has taken the bull by the horn, it is important that the leadership of the commission also encourage operators to adopt peer review mechanism.
Police and other law enforcement agencies should be equipped to check the rising incidences of vandalisation and theft of telecom equipment.
The power sector reform should also be accelerated to ensure regular steady power supply.
There can be no meaningful progress in the current situation where every operator provides own power and public power supply is a standby.
There is also need to pursue and encourage operators to co-locate their infrastructure and concentrate on their core area of competence to reduce cost.