Poor QoS could be hiting the Nigerian telecoms sector
Nigerian subscribers have been warned about the possibility of facing poor Quality of Service as some of the Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) operators start to scale down operations due to the harsh financial climate in the country, according to reports by Nigerian Communications Week.
According to the Guardian Nigeria, this downshift comes off the back of MTN sacking of some 280 workers and refusal by Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to remove IT/Telecom equipment from list of restricted items in access to foreign exchange.
The president of Association of Telecommunication Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), Mr. Olusola Teniola, Pictured, has urged for the CBN list to be reviewed, specifically around the items which are critical to the growth of the IT/telecoms sector of the economy. He thinks that the apex bank should reevaluate the list of 41 items and allow those which are critical to the IT/Telecoms sector to be exempt.
Teniola added that that the restrictions on a number of items has impacted expansions and other projects in the industry, thereby leading to poor quality of service (QoS).
The telecoms climate in Nigeria has been greatly affected by the decrease in the revenue stream of operators as a result of the increasing focus of data over voice services.
David Venn, chief executive officer, Spectranet, a 4G LTE internet service provider, explained to Nigerian Communication Week that the telecommunications landscape in the country is now changing from a voice centric to data centric source of revenue just as WhatsApp has almost eroded revenue that GSM operators are making from short message service (SMS).
“Operators need equipment to build towers. In the last one year it has been difficult for us to access dollar to import equipment for network expansion as well as adding capacity, the ones we are doing is from the equipment we imported before the new policy on FX, for big operators it has been very difficult for them to import equipment which has affected their efforts in adding capacity,” he said.
Staff Writer
