Telecommunications companies in Nigeria’s highly competitive market are relying heavily on price tariffs to gain market share and dominance, leading to a perceived fall in the Quality of Service (QoS) levels, according to the Annual Special Edition Telecoms Poll results released by NOIPolls Limited. This rather worrying situation, has resulted in the growing rate of dissatisfaction amongst users.
According to the results, 63 percent of mobile phone owning adult Nigerians currently use two or more phone lines in 2013, this is down from 74 percent in 2012. Findings however indicate that the proportion of adult Nigerians using one line has increased by 11 percent in 2013. Also half of the respondents (50 percent) rated the services of their main network provider as good while 55 percent affirmed they are getting value for money from their main network provider.
This proportion (55 percent) has remained constant over the two year period, however those that claim they are not getting value for money increased by 8-points in 2013.
The critical factors used by customers to define value for money were “network/ service quality” and “price tariffs”. Other top line results show that only (2 percent) of respondents have ported since the beginning of the portability drive, (26 percent) of respondents (majority) see the promotions of Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) as fake, up by 22-points in 2013. In order to generally improve the quality of telecommunication services in Nigeria majority of respondents (60 percent) suggested that “Network operators should be mandated to improve on their services”.
These were the key findings from the Telecommunications Snap Poll conducted in the week of December 9th 2013. The Nigerian telecoms sector has witnessed significant growth over the years and remains one of the best and fastest growing sectors of the Nigerian economy. The industry is ranked the largest and fastest growing telecom market in Africa and among the ten fastest telecommunication growth markets in the world. As at September 2013 the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) estimated a total of 121,271,218 subscribers and a tele-density of 86.62 in Nigeria.
The industry which contributes about 8.53 percent to the GDP (March 2013) has recently experienced a slow growth rate and series of challenges ranging from poor quality of service to steep competition. This implies that service providers rely heavily on price tariffs to gain market share and dominance leading to a perceived fall in the quality of service and an increasing rate of dissatisfaction amongst users.
Against this background NOIPolls conducted this special edition poll on the quality of telecoms services in Nigeria to explore the mobile phone usage patterns, quality of services provide by telecommunications providers and recommendation to improve the quality of services. The result presented is the second in series of annual telecoms polls conducted by NOIPolls; the first was conducted in 2012.
