An estimated 31 billion naira (US$194 million) was wasted by Nigerian telecoms subscribers on dropped and unconnected calls in 2012.
This was revealed by the Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) spending of 102 million subscribers which amounted to around103 billion naira.
During the period under review, the millions of subscribers paid the amount as a result of poor quality of services offered by the country’s various telecoms services companies which on average resulted in the wastage of more than 30 per cent of all call costs as revealed by Vanguard Newspapers.
In spite of upgrades by most of the operators, the quality of service has failed to record significant improvement effecting the majority of mobile users across the networks.
Concerning the improvement of the service quality and reducing the enormous amount of cost of failed calls, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) in December through its Director of Public Affairs, Tony Ojobo, expressed the commission’s readiness to introduce new sanctions for companies that fall short of its Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
He however expressed the NCC’s understanding of the plight of the companies when they were hit by natural and terrorists’ attacks.
“We will, however, take into account all those times the operators suffered disasters that were no fault of theirs. We know that there were times the operators suffered natural disasters but if the KPI says they had performed below par before those times, we will penalize them and I don’t think they should have any quarrel about that because the KPI is an agreement we made with them,” he said.
