Quality of service on mobile networks in Africa

Regulators impose financial sanctions on operators who do not respect the quality of service (QoS) standards

One of the many responsibilities of telecommunications regulators in Africa is to guarantee customer satisfaction. This implies that regulators must ensure the services offered by operators are of a high standard. According to the high number of complaints made by unsatisfied mobile users in many African countries, it seems as though regulators have a lot on their plate.

Some of them therefore made the decision to impose financial sanctions on any operator who did not provide quality service. Mobile telephony operators in Burkina Faso, Nigeria and Ivory Coast, among others, were thus warned that it was in their interest to respect the QoS levels indicated in their specifications.

In Ivory Coast, the Minister of Post and ITC, Bruno Koné, urged operators to provide their customers with quality service in order to avoid “reinforced” sanctions. “The sanctions will be serious enough to encourage all operators to regularize their networks as quickly as possible”, the minister added. A committee was put in place, whose purpose is to make specific recommendations to the operators.

The regulators in Burkina Faso and Nigeria have already taken action: indeed, the three mobile telephony operators in Burkina – Telmob, Telecel and Airtel –, received a total fine of more than 2 billion CFA Francs and in Nigeria, in 2011, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) gave a warning to three operators, MTN, Globacom and Airtel. In each case, the sanction was applied due to the high number of complaints received from customers dissatisfied with the quality of the service provided.

In Nigeria, the dissatisfaction is such that 29 million lines out of 125 million are inactive. This high rate of inactivity may indeed be due to “the bad quality of the services offered by certain operators, who forced many people to abandon their lines rather than lug around phones that do not work”, as was mentioned in an article published in IT Mag on 13 February 2012.

In Burkina Faso, the telecommunications regulator, the ARCEP, stepped in after the authorities and consumer organizations had called the three operators to order several times concerning the quality of their service. From May to June 2011, the ARCEP carried out an evaluation campaign on the QoS indicators. Since this campaign revealed “serious shortcomings”, the ARCEP gave the operators three months to sort out their issues in terms of QoS. After these three months, a second evaluation campaign was carried out, whose results pointed toward the fact that “the quality of service indicators included in the operators’ specifications still were not satisfactory.” The ARCEP therefore imposed a heavy financial sanction on the operators that represented “1% of the 2012 turnover before tax”, but was only the minimum that could be imposed on an operator who did not respect their specifications. Should the operators not comply, the ARCEP made provisions for incremental sanctions, which could go as far as the withdrawal of the operator’s license.

However, most regulators do not have the technical resources to would allow them to efficiently monitor and improve the QoS. Such technical means exist nevertheless. The network management and supervision platform developed by Global Voice Group, for example, makes it possible to evaluate the QoS indicators accurately. More and more regulators resort to these technologies in order to play a more active role in the control and improvement of the quality of the services offered by authorized operators.

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