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Blame Boko Haram, Others for Poor QoS – Goodluck

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Akinwale Goodluck,  corporate services executive at MTN Nigeria  has oversight for Regulatory/Government Relations, Commercial/Legal, Company Secretariat, Corporate Communications and the Corporate Social Responsibility function.

He is an acknowledged resource on issues pertaining to the legal and regulatory framework of the oil and gas, telecommunications and banking & financial services sectors.

Since joining MTN in December 2001 as commercial legal advisor, Goodluck has held positions of increasing responsibilities culminating in his latest appointment.
 
Goodluck had worked at Nigeria’s pioneer investment bank, NAL Merchant Bank where he acquired considerable expertise in legal advisory services, corporate finance and financial services.

Thereafter, he joined the services of The Law Union, a firm of barristers and solicitors, with primary responsibility for the Corporate and Commercial Law Group of the firm.
He spoke to Miebi Senge

Intractable Problem of Quality of Service
I think the issues around quality of service border around two things: one, there isn’t enough capacity; and secondly the availability of that capacity.
 So two things, capacity and continued availability of that capacity. The issue of capacity essentially lies in the hands of the operators. It is for us as operators to get a good understanding of the demand and put in the capacity to meet that demand.
The good news is that operators have the resources to install the required capacity but the reality is that it is extremely difficult to put infrastructure in the ground in our environment.
The same sort of infrastructure challenges that have bedeviled the power industry also affect the telecommunications industry. Telecoms infrastructure cannot exist in vacuum and there has to be parallel growth in other sectors for the full realization of the benefit of increased rollout.
Beyond that, when we are even able to put the infrastructure in the ground, the challenge then becomes making it available to carry traffic.
The litmus test is then to ask if that additional capacity is available to relieve the congestion in the network.
We are finding ourselves in a situation where operators are building base stations, integrating them into our networks, but because of circumstances beyond our control, that infrastructure is not carrying traffic.
And if that infrastructure is not carrying traffic, it is not relieving congestion. Then we begin to see the challenges in terms of quality of service. Definitely, customers’ experience will be very sub-optimal.

Why are They not Carrying Traffic?
When you are building a network, you need to make that network available to carry traffic. It needs to be integrated; it needs to be carrying traffic, and subsequently relieving congestion.
We find ourselves in a situation where, because of a lot of extraneous circumstances, a lot of infrastructure are not carrying traffic for no fault of the operators’. If you look at the North-East, we have about 200 base stations that are not available to carry traffic today because of the problem of insurgency, and the attacks on our base stations.
We also have a lot of base stations that are sealed up by different agencies of government. Again, this is contributing to lack of capacity.
Then, you have the day-to-day problems like community lock outs, area boys’ agitations, etc. All those things are also negatively impacting networks.
I would say in a nutshell, those are the two major factors impacting quality of service, and we need all stakeholders to resolve those issues.

Major Challenges to Quality of Service
It’s a challenging environment, but I dare say that to whom much is given, much is expected. As the biggest operator in Nigeria today, in fact, the biggest operator in Africa today in terms of subscriber number, there are a lot of expectations from our subscribers, our regulator, legislators, our friends in the media and other stakeholders about the quality of service.
 Nigerians are tired of excuses, and they want good quality. Aside from the things I spoke about earlier on, we’ve seen in this market in the last 18 months, a significant reduction in tariffs. This coupled with all sorts of promotions, has led to a greater demand for our services. So we have seen minutes of use go up as a result of tariffs coming down.
 People are talking a lot more and it means that we require a lot more capacity to deal with that. I think that perhaps some of the competition has been a little exuberant and there is need for the industry to self-regulate and ensure that as the industry chases subscriber number, we do not mortgage quality. So we find that the way prices have come down in the last 18 months has also led to greater demand and as such we are having to play catch-up all the time.
There is work for everybody, including the regulator to ensure that the business environment or the competitive environment is a lot saner so that we can preserve the long term sustainability of our industry.

MTN  and Local Content Initiative
The reality is that nobody can operate in an environment without using local resources. For us as a business, we have also gone beyond patronising people just for the sake of patronising them. We believe that there is significant value-add by using local contractors.
They are very competent and able Nigerians. We have worked with a few partners, and as our business has grown, their own businesses have grown tremendously. We see them in different areas of our business- in the areas of network build, information systems, marketing, sales and distribution. We are working with Nigerian partners
Recently, there has been a lot of clamour for more Nigerian participation and local content. I can share with you that while a lot of our competitors have handed over their entire network build to foreign OEMs, (we have also handed over a considerable part to the OEMs, which in this market are typically the Ericssons, Huaweis and ZTE).

What is the Status of WACS Now?
WACS is live and carrying traffic for MTN and a lot of other operators. A lot of people have both live and redundant capacity on WACS. WACS has delivered on expectations.
The Bandwidth pipe coming into Nigeria has increased.

Internet Experience
Your bottleneck is not at the WACS end. Your bottleneck is between where WACS terminates on the beach and where you are using Internet service.
If we had a situation where all my backhaul was done by fibre and all the base stations were connected by fibre, and then connected to the base station controllers (BSC) by fibre and then to the switch by fibre, the speed would be awesome.
Although we are able to land the speed at the beach, to distribute it inland as effectively as we would like remains a challenge.

What Would you be Saying to the NCC and other Stakeholders?
For us to achieve what we are all trying to in the area of broadband, we need a lot of fibre in the ground. We need a concerted effort; NCC to support the operator, to support the private sector to roll out this fibre. We need the involvement of the state and local government.
We need to take away the hand-cuffs and chains impeding roll out of fibre, such as prohibitive right-of-way costs, etc. We need the cost for right-of-way in Lagos or in Kano or any other city in Nigeria not to be more expensive than the cost for the right of way in New York. We need to have affordable fibre in the ground. That will translate to affordable bandwidth and a much better experience.

Nigerians Enjoying Latest Technology in the Mobile World
In our industry, yes. In fact, we are probably always at the cutting edge. Because of our volumes here, and the large appetite demonstrated by operators in Nigeria, we are typically being offered best-in-`class technology and we are always given top priority in terms of queuing for the latest equipment.
What we need to put on top of that is to ensure that we have an environment that can receive the infrastructure, so that we can see the benefit of the latest technology that the operators in Nigeria are deploying.

MTN’s Success in Nigeria’s Challenging Business Environment
I wish I could tell you everything we are doing, but I would be helping the competition. I think the bottom-line is that we took a decision to invest and reinvest, and we haven’t stopped investing. When a lot of people were scared and sceptical about Nigeria, we took the bull by the horns.
When some of our competitors were changing ownership regularly, we stayed the course. We are seeing the benefits of the investments that we have made.
Today, we have the biggest subscribers, serving in excess of 45 million Nigerians. With that amount of scale, your business will be big.
We are also a very frugal and prudent organisation. In the first five years of MTN Nigeria, we took a decision not to externalise any dividend. So no shareholder got any dividend for five years.
Instead, we put all the money back into the system and they are now beginning to reap the fruit of their labour.


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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