What we are doing on QoS – Danbatta

In this interview with Daily Trust, the Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) Prof Umar Garba Danbatta reveals what the regulator is doing about the quality of telecom service in the country. 

 The NCC met with all the telecom operators; what happened?

All the mobile operators were here because we have identi¿ ed degeneration in the quality of service. Before the consumers were the ones complaining about the quality of service and the complaints were anecdotal. But you know for the first time there is convergence between what the consumers are saying with regards to poor quality of service as well as measurement we have scienti¿ cally conducted and which conclusively indicated a worsening quality of service situation. So we were ready to share these facts with the operators. Because as a scientist and I am an engineer by training, you do not just say quality of service has dropped; you have to provide facts that will back the statement. So we did a powerpoint presentation to all the major operators including all infrastructure sharing service providers. So that they can be able to see all the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that we have measured on state by state basis and therefore extended to show the level of consumers experience at the national level. This is something that has never been done before. These KPIs are particular in respect of call-drop rate. And this is an important parameter because it says out of 100 calls, only one should be dropped. So the standard is 1%. And we have almost all the operators not meeting the standard in quite a number of locations, especially Lagos, Abuja and in the number of states in the Southwest and South-south in the months of October, November and December 2016. We have the data for the three months. So the whole essence is for the operators to see for themselves because these data were extracted from submissions by the operators to the NCC which we analyse and concluded that KPI in term of drop-call has not been met. So, at the end of the day, the major operators agreed, but they said they had challenges and they highlighted their challenges: fibre cut, community issues, Right of Way (RoW), multiple taxes, forex issue, vandalization of existing infrastructure by hoodlums, indiscriminate seal of base transmitter stations etc. They said all these are preventing from having necessary infrastructure to boost capacity in terms of coverage. We also highlighted all the efforts we were making to help them solve some of these challenges and we demanded that quality of service must improve. In fact we read the riot act to them: that the QoS is at the moment is not acceptable, not to the consumers and not to the NCC whose major mandate is to protect and empower the consumers. And this is consistent with sixth item of our 8-point agenda. And the second item of that agenda is on improving quality of service. So we have not done anything outside what we said we are going to do when we unveiled this agenda in 2016. So we are taking off with the mandates of our agenda, we are no theorising. The days of talking about the agenda in theoretical term are over. We are implementing our agenda now of which revolve around protection and empower of the consumers.

Do you see any positive change in QoS in the nearest future?

Well, we are going to monitor the quality of service again. Those set KPIs would be used again. The most important is the drop-call ratio; that is what Nigerians are conversant with. We are currently doing that of January, February and March. We are going to wait until the technical department finish analysing the data for the first quarter 2017. So when they have completed the compilation and analysis we will compare it with last quarter in 2016 to see if there is any improvement or further degeneration. I will not say anything now until the conclusion of the analysis. But we know what to do after the conclusion.

This interview first appeared in Daily Trust on Sunday in 2017