The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has appealed to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to ease its foreign exchange policies and make forex readily available to telecommunications operators who need them to purchase infrastructure for improved Quality of Service (QoS) to subscribers.
Worried by the degenerating quality of service provided by Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and other service providers as a result of the inability to import equipment to boost expansion, Umar Danbatta, the Executive Vice Chairman (EVC) of NCC yesterday told the operators that the Commission had written to Godwin Emefiele, the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and he was favourably disposed to addressing the forex needs of the operators.
Stakeholders say this is a good move as they have complained on several occasions that the unavailability of foreign exchange is hindering the purchase of critical infrastructure needed to roll out broadband services and improve data and voice services across the country.
“We don’t earn dollars and you all know that the needed equipments are brought in from foreign countries so where are we supposed to get money to procure those equipments? That contributed to some of the delays that we experienced initially in rolling out broadband. We have signed contracts a while ago but we needed to fund it using FX which was unavailable,” Biodun Omoniyi, Chief Executive Officer, Bitflux Communications told BusinessDay in an interview.
As a follow up to the letter written by the EVC, Sunday Dare, the Executive Commissioner (Stakeholders Management), NCC had a meeting with Emefiele and extracted a commitment from him on how he hoped to address the forex needs of the operators.
Danbatta who spoke yesterday in Abuja during an interactive session on Quality of Service delivery which NCC management had with operators said that since the NCC had declared 2017 as the year of the consumer; all hands should be on deck for telecom consumers to have a fresh lease to high Quality of Service.
“The consumer has to be treated with dignity” Danbatta added, saying the “8-point agenda drives this point home”.
The NCC, he explained, has put measures in place to check and monitor Quality of Service (QoS) on various networks “and we have sent this report to our task force on QoS and have been interacting with governments at different levels as part of the measures to deal with the poor QoS.”
Danbatta admonished the operators and co-location service operators to provide suggestions on how to address the situation.
Earlier, Ubale Maska, NCC’s Executive Commissioner (Technical Services) said QoS has been a great concern as consumers inundate the Commission with complaints.
“It requires everybody’s input if the situation has to be redressed, hence 2017 has been declared the year of the Consumer”.
Fidelis Ona, NCC Director, Technical Standards and Network Integrity (DTSNI), explained that the Commission is aware of some of the challenges which include Right of Way (RoW), Force Majeure, Difficulty in acquiring new cell sites, multiple taxation and regulation, vandalism, power supply among others.
“We are engaging stakeholders, including Industry Working Group on Quality of Service, special committee on Counter Harmonisation to address this”.
Edoyemi Ogoh, NCC’s Head, Quality of Service Unit, in his presentation traced poor quality of service to fibre cuts, community issues, among others.
Ogoh said in October 2016, operators experienced 175 cuts across the nation while they recorded 180 cuts in November and 103 in December, 2016.
Hassan Jamil Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at MTN Nigeria said; “the demand for both voice and data services are on the rise but we are unable to catch up on investment because of scarce forex availability.”
Jumoke Akiyode
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