NCA Slams MTN

THE NATIONAL Communications Authority (NCA) has accused players in the country's mobile telephony industry, especially MTN, of failing to improve upon their network quality.

The authority therefore directed MTN to rectify the problem of its poor network by November 8, 2007.

Another telecommunications network operator that was asked to improve on its service quality by NCA was OneTouch.

NCA thus asked MTN and OneTouch, two major operators that account for 88 per cent of traffic flows in the mobile telephony industry in Ghana, to resolve the problem of inter-connectivity by October 19, 2007.

The authority warned the two companies to cease activation of new access lines until their networks were appropriately dimensioned to take additional capacity.

NCA said it shall cause an audit to be undertaken into parties that failed to meet the deadline, adding that offenders would be severely sanctioned.

Customers of these service providers, especially MTN, had for sometime now been slamming the mobile telephony operators for doing little to address poor network quality.

NCA, at a news conference in Accra yesterday said its qualitative and quantitative market assessments at the end of the third quarter indicated clearly that the services of MTN needed improvement.

“MTN's network in particular has to drastically improve to address its growing traffic and resultant complaints,” Mr. Bernard Forson Jnr, Director General of NCA told journalists.

In the next quarter, Mr. Forson said the NCA would consider levying charges for access numbers or deploying number portability to enhance customer choice.

Mr Forson attributed the rapid growth of the telephony industry to the declining interconnect rate regime, issuance of conditional gateway licences and urged operators to plan and dimension their networks appropriately to absorb the new market demands and growing traffic.

According to him, the authority would continue to cooperate and collaborate with other institutions to ensure that institutional blockades in the telecommunications industry such as permit and land acquisition processes which contribute to service degradation were eliminated.

Mr. Forson stated that the NCA was far advanced in the procurement process to acquire a quality of service drive test equipment to independently monitor the performance of operators' networks across the country.

The equipment was expected to enable the authority to quantitatively measure degree of service quality across the nation in a timely manner.

By Emelia Ennin