Unstable power supply remains the major challenge on improving service delivery.  In spite of the fact that prize of diesel has stabilized since last year the burden is now on transporting it to base stations. Today, the road networks we have in the country is worst than it was few years ago, operators need to move diesel by road.

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 This means that if an operator orders for diesel in Abuja, he will have to move it to farest part of the North by road. Same in West, for instance, if diesel is ordered in Lagos it has to moved to some parts of Ogun state or even Oyo by road.

For instance, Lagos to Ibadan is a journey of about one hour ten minutes when the road is good, but today one spends about three hours on the same road.  Operators are not operating outside the social framework of Nigeria.  The fact remains that those issues operators are faced with, two years ago has gone worst by the day, it is convenient to come out and say ‘we blame operators for every thing, ‘because operators have the least voice. 

More so, infrastructure that operators have built is now being attacked by contractors of government.  When Lekki/ Epe expressway were been constructed, many fibre cable were excavated at operators cost. This situation is still going on in many states as at today. Those are infrastructure that were built some three years ago not ten or fifteen years ago.  The rebuilding of these infrastructure is to be bowed by operators without recourse to the owners.  Dualisation, expansion and rehabilitation of roads is going on across on the country, operators have laid optic fibre  to improve network back bone across the country, those infrastructure are suffering major attack due to road works by contractors of government, without regard to valid ‘right of way’ for which operators paid several millions of naira to government.

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The painful aspect of it is that there is no notice that there will be road works; all of a sudden network goes down, visit to site or location of failure, government contractors on site.  This result to starting the journey of recoil you don’t know many points of failure.  Because they are government contractors, operators can’t do anything, government has the power, and operators can only count their losses.  It is the consumer that suffers at the end of the day.

Telecom doesn’t work in the air, it works with physical infrastructure and you must lay the infrastructure for it to work.  If government refuses to allow operators lay infrastructure or make it difficult for them through high ‘right of way’ approval, one wonders how service quality won’t be poor.  It is ‘Ok’ for government to say service quality is very poor and can sanction operators from now till tomorrow; if those fundamentals are not addressed we cannot improve service quality.

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In recent times, base station masts owned by telecommunication companies have come under public focus largely due to the activities of the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (Nesrea).

The agency has shut down many base stations in certain areas of the country based on alleged violation of environmental laws and regulations by the companies. The agency reportedly mandated telecom companies to submit Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) reports of where their masts are located and because there had been alleged default, some base stations were therefore shut down.

Thus, the onslaught on telecoms mast by the agency strikes somewhat of a populist chord with the citizenry. But not everything that is popular is necessarily right or even legal. Other considerations must be taken into account in the overall interest of the people. This allows for a holistic problem-solving approach for which government, as the final arbiter of our social existence, is imbued with.

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While government must ensure compliance with environmental standards and regulations, the same government is also saddled with the responsibility of ensuring that telecom companies offer services in an efficient and qualitative manner to guarantee value for money spent by consumers.

There is no gainsaying the fact that base station masts are an integral infrastructure in the deployment of telecoms service. Thus, the quality of service offered by the companies is invariably linked to the existence/maintenance of the masts. In other words, the issue of getting value for money is seriously jeopardized when telecom masts are often shut down or vandalized.

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More so, when people talk about congestion, they are in different ways. The engineering is not something one can explain to one who does not have the background. Today, no network operator is working without the right ‘headroom’- this is the tolerance you have to coup with when there is upsurge in subscriber demand or capacity demand. Operators work with suitable ‘headroom’ what happens is that the demand for services sometimes prove wrong of the entire world known theories on projections for ‘headroom’ and others.

Mr. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman, Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (Alton), explained that the industry is embracing co-sharing of infrastructure. “Alton has championed the issue of co-sharing and we are glad that our members have embraced it to a very large extent. Presently, we have a number of roads where fibre infrastructure is being co-shared. Our concern is not that one operator will not allow the other to co-share infrastructure, but when you co-share and there is damage to that common infrastructure the impact is more”.

“We agree with the idea of co-sharing, we are supporting it, and encouraging our members to embrace it. After the infrastructure is co-shared, how to collectively protect the co-shared infrastructure that those brought together will not have colossal damage is an important issue”.

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He noted that part of responsibilities of government is to provide enabling environment and to protect operators in the environment. He cited instance of Central Lagos area, where as an operator lands a diesel truck, he will have to pay for landing, when he discharges he will be forced to pay for discharging the truck. “When you are taking away the truck from site you have to as well pay for taking away the truck from the site. It is called dispatch money; otherwise you don’t come next time.

This happens in many other local governments in the country. All these are on the neck of service providers and should be addressed for quality of service to improve.

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