Poor services: Group seeks N5000 compensation for subscribers

The National Association of Telecoms Susbcribers (NATCOM) has written to the Association of Licensed Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ALTON) and the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) seeking N5,000 compensation for subscribers over low quality services.

President of NATCOMS Deolu Ogunbanjo said about 12 years after the global system for mobile (GSM) communications made its debut, the operators were not offering services commensurate to the profit they are making.

The letter addressed to the chairman of ALTON, Gbenga Adebayo, and copied NCC’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Eugene Juwah, said the operators had failed to provide efficient services to subscribers.

In a swift reaction, Adebayo described the letter as a clear manifestation of the ignorance of NATCOMS about the dynamics of the industry.

Adebayo, who spoke with The Nation, said the NATCOMS president failed to take into cognisance the operating environment.

“We are looking at the letter. But my first impulse is that the letter appears to show that NATCOMS which claims to represent the interest of the subscribers does not understand the dynamics and reality of the operating environment. Regulation and infrastructure are part of the harsh operating environment. Asking for N5000 compensation for the subscribers at this time shows clearly that NATCOMS does not realise the dynamics of these factors,” he said.

In the letter, NATCOMS said: “The introduction of GSM in Nigeria in 2001 has brought about positive changes for individuals, corporate organisations, government at all levels and the country at large. It has saved thousands of lives in emergency, created and still creating jobs, eased communications within families, work places and across nations. It has brought Direct Foreign Investment (DFI) and boosted the nation’s Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP),” NATCOMS noted.

In spite of these advantages, the group said “the quality of service (QoS) profile that describes the performance evaluation of the system from the consumer perspective, using specific parameters has been poor.” NATCOMS identified these services parameters as call failure rate, call drop rate, call set-up rate, call completion rate, billing accuracy, voice quality, network outages/downtimes, spectrum efficiency, international roaming, traffic channel congestion, and others, arguing that the operators have failed to deliver on all.

Some of the operators’ network deficiencies include “dialing a number between five and 10 times before getting connected /not-connected, dialing several times and still getting a ‘call failed’ message, moving from one place to the other in search of network signal before receiving or making calls,” adding that a subscriber would be lucky if both caller and recipient hear each other without voice-breaks. “Often times, the caller /recipient may hear the recipient /caller, while the caller /recipient cannot hear. Yet this incomplete call is paid for,” the letter read.