The recent feud between MTN, Glo, Airtel and Etisalat – , Nigeria’s big four mobile operators and the Nigeria Communications Communication (NCC), the industry regulator leading to a hefty cumulative fine of N1.17 billion threw up several mindboggling questions.
One of such on the minds of the subscribers: did NCC act on behalf of the customers and if so, why are the funds going to the regulator, rather than the subscriber?
Again, the question arises: who loses if the NCC asks non-cooperating operators to leave in ‘national interest’?
Answers to the second question put more issues of ‘national interest’ at the front burner. Who defines ‘national interest’?
Bolaji Abdulahi, the Minister of Sports, recently gave an insight to the ‘national interest’ question with a new twist when he stopped the football federation from signing on the Belgian Tom Saintfeit, as national technical director – ‘in national security interest’.
In the instance of telcos vs. NCC the national question issue has even become indistinctive, especially since Nigeria has no fall back national carrier.
Globacom was awarded a ‘second national carrier’ status, but its posturing in terms of ‘national interest’ is subject for another discuss.
Mobile operators in Nigeria got on the wrong side of the law following failure of key performance indicator (KPI), carried out by the industry watchdog.
In communicating to the telcos on their continued KPI failures, Ms. Josephine Amuwa, Director of legal and regulatory services, and Ubale Maska, Head of compliance monitoring and enforcement at NCC noted that the Commission had noted that the operators quality of services (QoS) performance in the months of January and February 2012 were below the ‘specified thresholds.’
“However, for the purpose of enforcement of the new Quality of Service Regulations, the Commission had taken these periods as grace period.” It subsequently ordered the foursome to pay the cumulative fine of N1.170 Billion for the months of March and April, 2012 on or before May 21, 20112; with a caveat that failure to comply automatically attracts addition N2.5 million daily fines.
As the arguments swung left and right, the way out of the quagmire of poor QoS offered by telcos is for them to first see themselves as ‘service providers’ rather than ‘network operators’.
Hugh Bradlow, chief technology officer of Australia’s Telstra noted that the “telecommunications industry is, at its heart, a service provider business – we just got a bit distracted for a 100 years or so by being ‘network operators’ because we had this large asset that gave us control over services.
So at the heart of the operators have always being – profit – rather than service or so many Nigerians see them.
Profit drives the ‘networks’ to load their system, roll out services even when they are aware of poor QoS as a result of over-capacity utilization leading to network congestions.
Bradlow believes that with the emerging telecom ecosystem occasioned by competing new technologies, telcos should instead “focus on delivering a holistic customer experience that empowers the consumer and business and allow them to get the most out of their services – fixed as well as mobile.”
He spoke at the GSMA Mobile Asia Expo 2012 last week and noted that Telstra is “working on a wide range of partnerships with all sorts of players in the industry, ranging from our large traditional vendors, to new startups to the so-called over-the-top players. We are doing this to ensure that we can deliver the best possible user experience to our customers.”
Perhaps, as often cited by critics, it would do Nigerian operators a world of good if they re-invent their business module to fit into the peculiar operating environment rather than the one-fit-all approach seem to be adopted in a challenging terrain as Nigeria.
It would do them better to present themselves as one-partner-with-Nigeria, rather than businesses that repatriate capital out the Nigerian economy.
The NCC appears to be in a no-win-situation – it would swim or sink with the operators’ overbearing tendencies rather than revert to the pre-GSM Nitel monopoly days. The operators seem aware of the fact that Nigeria has no fall-back backbone; hence they would remain its ‘beautiful bride’.
Franco Bernabe, GSMA chairman is already predicting more growth by 2015 that would see 9.1 billion mobile connections, 4.6 billion subscribers, 3.2 billion mobile broadband connections and 350 million LTE connections, generating $1.9 trillion and providing close to 10 million jobs.
To achieve this goal, Bernabe noted there was need for more investments, condoned by a healthy competitive and fair regulatory environment.