NCA rates Vodafone as best in Quality of Service

The first telecom Quality of Service (QoS) report this year from National Communications Authority (NCA) indicates that Vodafone Ghana is the only operator which did not record any failures.

The report, based on test conducted in 14 communities of the Greater-Accra Region in the month of February 2016, also shows that Vodafone was one of two telcos that scored highest on speech quality, the other was Glo.

The report covered call congestion rate, call drop rate, call set up time, call completion, Stand-alone Dedicated Control Channel (SDCCH) Congestion Rate, and voice quality rate.

SDCCH Congestion is defined as the probability of failure of accessing a stand-alone dedicated control channel during call set up. This should be less than or equal to one per cent.

Call Setup Time (CST) is the period of time it takes for the receiver's phone to ring after the sender had dialed the number and pressed send; it is supposed to be 10 seconds or less in 95 per cent of calls.

Call Congestion Rate (CCR) is the probability of failure of accessing a traffic channel during call setup; the acceptable rate is one per cent.

Voice Call Drop Rate (CDR) is the probability of a call terminating without any of the users’ will; only up to three per cent of calls are allowed to drop.

Call Completion Rate is defined as the probability that a call has, after being successfully set up, be maintained during a period of time and ending normally. It is expected that at least 70 per cent of calls will run their full course.

The test measured performances by the five 3G players - MTN, Vodafone, Tigo, Airtel and Glo. The sole CDMA player, Expresso is no longer being measured due to a myriad of operational, financial and other challenges facing that operator.

The fine details showed that none of the five telcos failed on call drops and SDCCH, but two failed in at least one indicator, and the two also failed in two.

But the degrees of failures, indicated by the number or communities in which the breaches occurred differed from telco to telco.

For instance, both MTN and Tigo recorded failures in call set up time, but while MTN's breach was in Dodowa alone, Tigo failed in Gbawe and Accra proper.

Airtel recorded the highest number of call set up failures in as many as eight of the 14 communities measured, while Glo saw failures in seven communities.

Again, only Airtel recorded one breach in call completion rate at Adenta, and Glo was also the only telco to record one hitch in call congestion rate at Gbawe.

Indeed, apart from staying within all the parameters, Vodafone also scored very high even in cases where other telcos passed.

On call completion rate, for instance, Vodafone scored 100 per cent in 11 out of 14 communities measured.

No telco excelled in voice quality, but Vodafone and Glo made a "good" score, while the other three recorded "fair" voice quality for the period.

The NCA says it has since notified all the telcos about the failures and has urged them to improve.