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.