Telecommunications operators especially Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) are faced with quality of service issues. In line with our promise of offering stakeholders in the industry opportunity to be heard, Mr. Gbenga Adebayo, chairman Association of licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (Alton) explains to subscribers and other stakeholders why quality of service is not getting better.
Persistent Poor Quality of Service
The persistent poor quality of service in spite of sanctions by Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) means that the factors responsible for poor service delivery have not been addressed. Unstable power supply remains the major challenge on improving service delivery. Last year a litre of diesel was sold at N80 but today a litre of diesel is sold between N140 and N170 depending on where you buy and where you are transporting it to. Today, the road networks we have in the country is worst than it was a year ago, operators need to move their things by road. This means that if an operator orders diesel in Abuja, he will have to move it to farest part of the North by road, same in West, if diesel is ordered in Lagos it has to be moved to the farest part of the West by road.
Take for instance, Lagos to Ibadan is a journey of about one hour ten minutes when the road is good, but today one spends about five hour on the same road. Operators are not operating outside the social framework of Nigeria. The fact remains that those issues we 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, blames, sanctions and discipline of operators can’t address the problem until we begin to isolate the problems one after the other, we won’t make any head way. We are concerned as an association, because today, we see more threat to issues of service of quality than we have seen in the years past. Why? Infrastructures that operators have built are now being attacked by contractors of government. Take a drive to Lekki/Epe expressway you see how many fibre cable that has been excavated that are still on the side of the road. Those are infrastructures that were built two years ago not ten or fifteen years ago. The rebuilding of those infrastructures is to be bowed by operators without recourse to the owners. Dualisation, expansion and rehabilitation of roads is going on across the country, operators have laid optic fibre to improve network backbone 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.
You don’t receive any 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. We have contract from Abuja, we are going to dualise the road. To that end, you start the journey of recoil you don’t know how many points of failure. Because they are government contractors you 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.
We have been on Abuja issue for more than three years; there has not been the right number of service stations and cell sites required to cover the traffic in Abuja, not because operators are not willing to do, but authorities there will not allow operators to install cellular stations.
Telecom is terrestrial. It 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 in Abuja I wonder how service quality won’t be poor. It is ‘Ok’ for government to say service quality is very poor in Abuja, and can sanction operators from now till tomorrow; if those fundamentals are not addressed we cannot improve service quality.
About stakeholders forum on vandalization
We are glad that the problem is been discussed, which means that the regulator admits that there is problem in that regard. For the fact that Nigerian Communications Commission called stakeholders meeting means that it has been identified now as a problem. All the time we made representation to the government on the challenges of quality of service has been treated with a wave of the hand. They said “what are you talking about? Who is damaging your infrastructure?” Now that the issue is been discussed, it begins to draw attention of government to some of those things we’ve always spoken about that are treat and impact on quality of service. Until such a time when telecom is classified as national security infrastructure it will not deter people from damaging our infrastructure that is what we are clamouring for.
Let it be known that telecom infrastructure is national security infrastructure and we need to enact a law to support that. It is then that people will be deterred from tapering with the infrastructure. In the Nigeria Telecommunications Limited (Nitel) days, there is miscellaneous offenses decree, where people found liable of damaging Nitel and Power Holding Company infrastructure are sentence to long term imprisonment of up to 21 years. Today, nothing is protecting the service providers.
Is it normal for operators to operate their own power networks? Is also normal to operate under the kind of environment that we operate? Where people go to site and bring down infrastructure on site with impunity, stealing of diesel, generators as well as critical components on cell site. These things that are stolen are sold in the market.
Today, telecom service providers run their main core telecom networks; we run electricity network and diesel supply network and all other kinds of support services to backup the infrastructure. It is difficulty. Until these fundamentals are addressed, we will continue to talk about quality of service.
Another issue is that some states and local government have all kinds of revenue laws that service providers must comply with, failure to comply results in we not accessing our sites, our vehicles cannot move in those States, we can’t maintain existing sites and fibre networks.
Let government do its own, we will do our own. Part of responsibilities of government is to provide enabling environment and to protect operators in the environment. If you go to central Lagos area, when you land a diesel truck, there you have to pay for landing the truck, when you discharge you have to pay for discharging the truck, and when you are taking away the truck from site you have to as well pay for taking away the truck from 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.
Who bears the cost of excavated infrastructure on roads under construction?
The cost of rebuilding the excavated telecom infrastructure is bowed by the operators whose infrastructure is affected. In some cases we have to pay to the same road contractors to allow us to build trenches on the road edges, because in most cases the design of our roads does not make provision for service infrastructure.
As an engineer, I’m worried that by the time we have to rebuild the last mile on our electrical networks all these roads we are building the power people will come and cut it again. This is likely to happen in the next three years.
Operators and sharing of fibre optic cable
Today, the industry is embracing co-sharing, and we are in full support of co-sharing. Alton has championed the issue of co-sharing, and we are glad that our members are embracing it to 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.
Congestion and inexperienced technical workers
The issue of operators not using the right manpower might not be correct, what might be correct is the loss of competent manpower to other countries. Most competent manpower, trained hands have left this country because of better attraction in other countries. For instance, take a brilliant Nigerian train him on a switch that is made by a major world manufacturer, send him to best training centres across the world, you bring him back, he works here for two or three years. He becomes a specialist in that equipment, which is common equipment across the world, and he find attraction in another country, he leaves without regard to the training you gave to him. That is an issue that the industry is facing today. If you ask the people why they are leaving they complain about the social problem. One could have a good job with fat salary but the problem of social pressure is making us to loss good hands to developed markets.
The problem is high mobility of people who have being trained that is suppose to be specialist now handling core network elements here and we are losing them on account of failure of our social infrastructure.
When people talk about congestion, they are in different ways. The engineering is not something one can easily 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. There are a number of issues when you come to the point of expansion of the network, for example, if you have enough headroom of about 70% the international standard is that you allow for headroom of about 15% but we allow for 70%. In no distance time it is consumed, and you have to begin a process of expansion, so from commissioning it takes a minimum of six months before it is consumed.
As a player and representative of the operators I’m saying that telecom remains the most functional infrastructure in the country today.