Local mobile firms fail to meet global benchmarks

Consumers are now able to access reliable and objective information about the mobile services in the market following the release of a study on the quality of services offered by telecommunication operators in the country.

Last week, a local ICT firm released a comprehensive report assessing the performance of the services of the four mobile players as measured against international standards and the local regulator’s benchmarks.

According to the report, none of the four operators meets the full quality threshold gazetted by the industry regulator Communication Commission of Kenya (CCK) a few months ago.

“All the measured operators scored below international benchmarks, (although) Zain is the closet to the target value of four seconds set by CCK,” noted the study findings.

While Safaricom, Yu and Zain suffered “from congested trunk lines at some point of the measurement campaign,” Orange was found to have the worst overall handover performance, a measure of the successful call completion rate.

The report found that Zain had the best overall performance on the measured key performance indicators that include speech quality, call completion rate, dropped calls, blocked calls, and handing over of calls from one base station to another.

Safaricom had the best network coverage but the lowest quality customer experience in terms of “bad quality voice calls, call disconnects during the conversation, and long call set up times.”

The relatively poor quality voice services on Safaricom’s network are attributed to its “large size and huge number of subscribers”.

The firm is estimated to have 14.5 million subscribers, representing 78 per cent market share.

All the telecoms passed the call completion score card.

They however failed to meet call setup time — taking over four seconds to connect calls.

The report focused on GSM mobile services in Nairobi, the highest source of traffic in the country.

The findings were based on consumers’ experience and perceptions.

In comparing local operators to their peers around the world, the study noted that call success rate is fairly good for all the operators in Nairobi compared to international operators.

The study compared the local operators with counterparts in the Caribbean, Middle East and Central America.

Two months ago, another telecom market research done for Zain by Millward Brown, found that Telkom Kenya had the highest customer satisfaction levels, followed by Zain and Safaricom respectively.

This is the fist time that an evaluation of the mobile players’ services is being made public.

Although the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) has its own research and evaluation team and therefore has an official position regarding the quality of mobile services it has thus far not shared its findings with the public, citing gag laws.

According to CCK officials who spoke to Business Daily, the institution plans to announce an amendment to this law by January next year through a gazette notice which will then allow it to go public with such information.

CCK then plans to circulate regular reviews of the telecoms industry’s products and the quality of their services in the media.

Consumers are the biggest beneficiaries of this new free flow of information about the quality of mobile services although the analysis is aimed at providing information to the government and industry players for purposes of measuring compliance to set standards and to assist them improve as needed.

Reliable information

End users who have been operating in the dark for over a decade will now have reliable information at their disposal provided by both the government and independent firms.

Hitherto the only source of information available to end users has been provide by the mobile operators themselves.

A user can now evaluate various aspects of the call services provided by mobile operators and make informed decisions.

In addition, a potential subscriber can make a projection of the quality of services he can he or she can expect from a particular company based on an assessment of the correlation between subscriber build up and frequency of infrastructure upgrades.

This will be especially important in the future as quality of service is expected to increasingly carry more weight in mobile operators’ subscriber retention strategies than price which has hitherto been a key determinant of customer retention.

“We welcome this noble step by independent players in the industry to measure customer experience.

Through such initiatives, we are optimistic competition in the industry will soon be based on quality of service, not price,” Mr Rene Meza, Zain’s chief executive said in an earlier interview.

Turf wars

The presence of four major players in the local market and the resulting competition has led to fierce turf wars based on price that have brought tariffs steadily down.

Analysts see tariffs soon levelling out.

Mr Mickael Ghossein, Telkm Kenya’s CEO said in an earlier interview that he foresees a situation where voice calls will be virtually free, just like in Europe.

“Voice calls will be a value added service to data offerings that will be the main source of revenue," he said.