The liberalization of telecommunications sector of the country’s economy some nine years ago has witnessed a lot of transformation and challenges mostly associated with developmental stage in evolution of telecommunications in any society especially; one with infrastructural challenges such as is the case in Nigeria.
 The sector has managed to surpassed such problems as government ownership of a monopoly telecommunications company, government funding of telecom infrastructure development, slow pace of network rollout, long waiting line for services and consumers limited to only one service provider among others. Today, Nigeria has become one of the fastest growing markets in the world for mobile communications.
It was not all rosy for the operators and Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) the regulatory body in the first phase in development of the sector as they had to address problem of interconnectivity, effective competition, monitoring, compliance and enforcement as well as consumer education.
Having addressed these teething problems to greater percentage of success, telecommunications sector is now preparing to face the next frontier of the developmental process.
The next frontier
The question that arises is what are the expectation of both consumers and operators for the next frontier in this developmental process? This was explained by Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, executive vice chairman, NCC, that Nigerian operating companies are paying rather high bandwidth charges for satellite links in the country. This he said has discouraged extensive use of the satellite as alternative medium for long distance transmission requirements.
These high charges have prevailed in spite of the fact that the Nigerian business represents over 60% of the African business portfolio for a number of the International Satellite Organisations.
He emphasized the need to open up discussions on how to drive down the charges perhaps, by consolidating the requirement on a national basis and using that to negotiate better bandwidth prices.
“This is especially critical at this time when satellite can be employed to bridge the gap, while the roll out of the terrestrial alternatives is being implemented,” he said. This issue will be addressed in the next frontier as Glo 1, MainOne and West Africa Cable System will soon come on stream to complement South Altantic Undersea Cable (Sat-3). These initiatives are expected to provide enough bandwidth that will reduce the cost and over dependent on satellite.
National fibre optic ring project initiated by Globacom has reach 80 percent completion as well as those of MTN, and Zain will as reduce the high cost of network rollout even as NCC has expressed its readiness to ensure that such important transmission facility is shared by operators.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is one of the features in the next frontier of development in telecommunications sector. However, some operators have adopted and are currently implementing outsourcing as the way to go in the emerging next phase of development in the sector. Outsourcing is the transferring of certain business functions from internal staff to outside contractors. Outsourcing commonly is applied to non-core functions, such as accounting, information technology, human resources, facilities management, fleet management, parts manufacturing, payroll, press relations, and real estate management for reasons that include lowering costs, avoiding liabilities, and allowing management to focus on the core business. Outsourcing also is an excellent way for management to shift or even avoid responsibility.
A recent report published by Analysys has emphasized the benefits of judicious outsourcing of business processes by telecommunication companies. According to the report, telecom companies need to have a relook at their outsourcing policy, and be open to agreements with third party outsourcing firms in areas that were formerly considered "core" concerns. By redefining their outsourcing outlook, companies can leverage the benefits of cost cuts, flexibility, and profit growth.
There are some key factors that telecom companies must consider in shaping their outsourcing policies, such as their market positioning, strategy, internal expertise and current efficiency. The Analysys report looks into the possible benefits that can be derived from outsourcing, and also the risks involved in handing over management of business processes to a third party. There is also evidence that outsourcing can help operators to achieve significant cost savings.
Number portability
Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has indicated its preparedness to implement Number portability in the sector as part of next phase in the development of the sector. Number portability is a telecommunication network function, which allows subscribers to switch services, service providers, or locations without changing their telephone numbers. Near-term number portability is typically implemented by existing telecommunication services such as remote call forwarding. Long-term number portability can be implemented under the advanced intelligent network (AIN) platform. Portability is possible in fewer countries with respect to cellular service. There are restrictions, however. For example, it is generally not possible to port a number across landline and cellular domains. Neither can numbers be ported across countries.
The Dominican Republic is the most recent country out of over 30 that have implemented number portability; it did on September 30, 2009. It is the second country in the Caribbean to launch NP after Puerto Rico, and the fourth country in Latin America to have fixed and mobile NP. Brazil and Mexico launched its NP last year, while Panama has had fixed line NP in place for several years but does not have mobile NP.
The benefits of number portability are seen not necessarily in the amount of people porting to other operators but in the fact that operators are obliged to up their game and focus on quality service and customer retention. That obliges them to keep investing in their networks.
José Magana, analyst with Pyramid Research, reiterated that view, saying that experience in other markets shows that few numbers end up being ported and the benefits lie elsewhere.
"Even though number portability may not end in a lot of numbers being ported, it moves competition to other things like efficiencies and offering good quality services, offering better handsets. We’re positive that the DR’s move into number portability will be important and benefit customers," Magana said.
Service assurance
In the extraordinarily competitive telecom sector, customer satisfaction is the ultimate metric of success. The surest path to a strong business bottom line is assuring that customers receive the highest appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) across multiple applications and delivery mechanisms. At the same time, however, isolating and resolving technical problems across a complex telecom infrastructure, and evaluating them in the context of the customer experience, is no simple trick.
As a result, service assurance evolves as a discipline along two paths. First, within service management, growing from rudimentary root cause analysis—based on element managers and low-level network interfaces—to a more sophisticated, integrated and mature function of Operations Support Systems (OSS).
Second, service assurance will grow in relevance across the organization, developing gradually into a key business intelligence source which delivers performance and service delivery analytics to even the highest level of the organizational hierarchy.
Performance management
Just as it has grown and matured, the essential theory and implementation of service assurance will see significant change. The automation of fault management, for instance, will become important when networks reached a level of maturity and complexity that rendered simple readouts useless. An analysis layer will be required, and the fault management sector born.
Similarly, it becomes clear that the robustness of network architectures meant that network fault events will not always translate directly into degraded network performance. Performance management, as a subsection of service assurance, should be created to distinguish performance-impacting faults from those requiring a prioritized response—from lesser faults.
These two systems—fault management and performance management—have come to represent different views of network integrity and, considered as a whole, comprise a fairly comprehensive view of network robustness.
Are operators prepared?
Having gone pass different operating and environmental challenges in the course of service delivery, telecommunications operators have shown some level of preparedness for the next frontier in the developmental process of the telecommunications sector. Nigeria CommunicationsWeek investigations have revealed that most of components in the next phase are initiated by operators, such as undersea cable initiative, outsourcing and collocations of infrastructure. More so, industry watchers are of the view that the most important aspect in the next level rest on number portability which assert some level of responsibility on the operators that will require performance management and service assurance.
They however, expressed optimism that most of the operators in the country have their parent company or its affiliate operating in countries that have reach the level at which the country’s telecommunications sector is moving to, which will afford them the opportunity of adjusting their operations fast to meet with the expectations of the new frontier.