The executive board of Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Nigeria’s telecommunications industry regulator, has said it is now ready to intervene in what has become a common practice in which telecoms operators in Nigeria send adverts and promotions indiscriminately to subscribers.
Trough the nation’s communications technology minister, NCC said it sees the act as dissatisfactory and addressing it hinges upon the need to improve the quality of service delivery.
Speaking in Abuja at a forum organized by the News Agency of Nigerian (NAN), the federal minister said it’s a common fact that when service providers roll of promotions, the quality of service in greatly affected as a result of an explosion in the number of subscribers to the affected network.
She added that with more subscribers on a service provider, the network battles with coping with more pressure.
She said this “isn’t unconnected to the dismal quality of GSM service delivery in recent times in Nigeria.” According to her, the phenomenal growth being recorded in the nation’s telecoms sector is posing demand challenge for the various service providers.
While accepting that the telephone advertisements and promotions are not exclusively responsible for the poor quality of service delivery, she also noted the contributions of some recent natural and man-made disasters that befell Nigeria.
“In September, we had a number of attacks on the base stations in the North-East part of the country. A lot of these base stations were taken out and of course that affected the quality of service in the northern part of the country. This created several challenges so that’s why you see that the quality of service has actually got worse,” the minister said.
She reiterated the commitment of her ministry to partner with NCC to reduce the pressures that are currently on the network providers who are always competing for the largest market share.
“One of the ways in which we can do that and which is going to happen in the next days or weeks is that we’ll begin to curtail the promotions because what the promotion does is that it either increases the number of subscribers unto your network or it increases the number of minutes of calls on your networks,” she said.
