QoS in an era of cheap smartphones

If you need a phone with which you can conveniently use the ever popular social media, surf the web and indeed carry out sundry data-driven activities including downloading the music of your favourite artistes, go get yourself a smartphone. The smartphone differs markedly from the older feature phones in, among others, its ability to enable and facilitate data transactions. Smartphones were initially exclusive to the high end variants, costing consumers in the range of N70,000 to N80,000 to sometimes well over N100,000. Obviously only those with sufficient disposable incomes, most likely the upper demographic segments could have afforded such phones. Over the years, however, the smartphone has gradually permeated the lower segments of the demographic pyramid. Now, there are smartphones for the mid-tier category costing between N25,000 and N45,000 and hordes of smartphones for the low-tier category costing as low as N8,000.

According to the online retailing site, Jumia, the low-end (read cheap) brands of smartphones are today, their best selling products. There are lots of models of low end smartphones provided by such brands as Samsung, LG and lots of Chinese manufacturers. The lure of the cheap smartphone lies in its affordability. Affordability in turn, makes it accessible to students, artisans, subsistence farmers, traders and many more in the lower demographic segments who would ordinarily be unable to afford smartphones. The smartphone is a major deviation from the feature phone of old, largely on account of its operating system which enables it to utilise  the hordes of services that can be enabled by mobile broadband. It therefore has considerably higher utility than the feature phone.

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The smartphone enables seamless access to the internet which is perhaps the basis of its considerably heightened utility. So whether it’s in accessing increasingly popular social media sites such as Facebook and Instagram or instant chat sites, or indeed corporate emails and online retail sites, the smartphone provides a ready and willing means to millions of Nigerians in a clime where there is still a huge deficit in access to PCs and laptops. Indeed current statistics indicate that access to online retail sites by Nigerians is predominantly via the smartphone. Elsewhere, it is mainly via PCs. The increasing popularity of social media implies that on a regular basis, many Nigerians are engrossed in social media sites, taking, uploading and sending pictures to friends and family, surfing online retail sites, chatting, communicating via emails, consuming content in the hundreds of blogs and online news sites, and many other activities.

The smartphone is a vista to a whole new world in entirety, a world that is at once virtual and at the same time, practical; a new world where your friend may express an interest in the dress you wore in that photo you just uploaded on Instagram, order for it on Konga.com and pay physical cash for it on delivery to her doorstep by Konga’s salespeople. The smartphone is indeed, giving practical expression to the mobile broadband revolution, initiated by the telecom industry with MTN’s launch of third generation mobile services, 3G, in 2008. Other telecom companies followed thereafter, with the deployment of 3G technology. Today, of the more than 25,000 base stations with which telecom companies provide services to customers across the country, some 10,000 are 3G base stations, meaning that they are able to support the specialized mobile data communications needs of today’s smartphone users.

To support growth in mobile data, up to 15,000 additional 3G base stations would need to be erected over the next few years by the telecommunications industry. Today’s typical smartphone is a repository of sundry mobile applications. There is an application, for instance, Dobox, with which one could rent and watch full length movies. There is an application with which one could monitor the impending elections in Nigeria including the review of names and manifestoes of candidates and their parties. There is even an application with which one can monitor traffic in the ever-busy Lagos metropolis. Many of the applications have been the product of the genius of the thousands of ICT savvy youngsters across Nigeria. While creating value for users of these smartphones these youngsters have also become empowered economically, on the strength of their creativity, impacting positively on Nigeria’s developmental aspirations.

The growth of smartphones has had a huge implication on the capacities of the various telecom networks. As stated earlier, specialized base stations, 3G base stations are required to facilitate the kind of data requirements of today’s smartphone, the data requirements of the mobile broadband economy. 3G base stations, by implication are more sophisticated than the older models of base stations, the second generation or 2G base stations. Currently, 3G and the even more sophisticated fourth generation (4G) base stations are being steadily erected by telecom industry operators. Simultaneously, dozens of second generation base stations (2G) are being upgraded to 3G to cope with the ever increasing data needs of Nigeria’s telecom consumers. The reality, however, is that while the growth in demand for data and its associated services has been in geometric proportions, the corresponding growth in infrastructure by the telecom companies has been of arithmetic proportions.

It is this deficit that manifests in the regular bouts of capacity challenges in the networks characterised by difficulties in making calls, dropped calls and the like and which merely differ in intensity from time-to-time across all of the networks. Clearly, therefore, the telecom networks need to continue to aggressively bolster their network capacities in order to strive to catch up with the runaway capacity demands of today’s telecom consumers. There is an imperative for increasingly creative thinking in this regard by the telecom networks. The networks need to continuously examine ways by which they can optimize the capacity with which they avail telecom consumers. One way by which they have done this has been to outsource much of their network management functions to specialist third parties such as the telecom network providers, Ericsson and Huawei. Doing so, divests them of the logistic and other challenges of physically erecting base stations and towers, enabling them focus on the more strategic business of planning and forecasting network capacity and raising capital for such investment as well as customer experience management.

Telecom companies also have a duty to continuously inform consumers of the true state of affairs regarding capacity and quality of service. As our analysis above shows, the growing disposition of consumers towards data services poses a growing challenge to all the telecom networks which manifests in bouts of poor quality of service especially in the area of voice communication. This will be mitigated by continued investment in infrastructure by telecom companies. It is understandable that in the crucial quest for numbers by the telecom industry, there is the need to differentiate by way of promotional claims and assertions regarding quality of service provided. What the industry needs to is to balance such claims with occasional realistic propositions to key stakeholders as to the true state of affairs in the industry, in order to fully optimize the potential of customer empathy. Today, the networks appear to over-promise, creating illusionary images of super-efficient always-on services, whereas the reality is that they are all, without exception, victims of the immense capacity demands of Nigeria’s broadband revolution.

BEN UZOR