A Safaricom customer care centre in Nairobi. CCK has said that the mobile phone company has failed to meet minimum standards on quality of calls. File
The Information and Communications ministry is seeking heavier penalties against mobile phone operators who fail to meet the quality of service standards set by the communications regulator.
The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) found that Safaricom and Airtel failed to meet minimum quality of service standards in the year to June and declared smaller rivals, Telkom Orange and Essar Telecom, compliant.
The operators are currently fined Sh500,000 for breach of the quality of service standards and the ministry is working on a policy that will raise the fines, saying the current penalty is too lenient and has failed to make the operators comply.
The telcos are expected to deliver overall performance of at least 80 per cent to be compliant, but Safaricom has the worst score of 50 per cent compared to last year’s 75 per cent while Airtel was rated at 62.5 per cent against the previous year’s 75 per cent. Telkom and Essar both achieved 87.5 per cent.
“We need to change the policy and make the fines a little bit higher to make the operators take the matter of quality more seriously than they do now,” said Dr Ndemo, adding that the Sh500,000 fine is insignificant for firms with annual revenues of tens of billions of shillings. Safaricom sales for the year to March stood at Sh107 billion.
Kenya is seeking to follow in the footsteps of Nigeria and Rwanda, which introduced hefty fines against telecommunication companies that failed to meet quality checks.
In May, Nigeria fined four telecom companies a combined $7.4 million (Sh636.4 million) for failing to meet minimum service standards.
Last year, Rwanda revoked the license of Rwandatel for poor service and slapped MTN Group a daily fine of $4,000 (Sh344,000) due to substandard services and network failure. The financial penalty begun on September 14, and was applicable until the South African tech giant fixed the problem.
In Kenya, the quality assessment is in its third year running and is based on eight indicators measured from different regions in the country. These are completion of calls, success of calls set-up, the call set-up time, call drop rates, blocked calls tendencies, speech quality, handover success rate and the strength of the received signals.
According to CCK, the operators are supposed to meet seven out of the eight quality benchmarks and in the previous year, none of the operators were compliant.
The latest CCK quality report highlighted the correlation between a poor score and the number of subscribers in a network. “This seems to be the case for Safaricom and Airtel, whose compliance levels tend to be erratic in areas where they have the most subscriber activity (Nairobi and Central), leading to poor quality and non-compliance,” read part of report released on Friday.
“Safaricom’s overall performance in this period went way below their compliance level the previous year.”
Safaricom has a big lead over rivals with a subscriber base of 19 million in June from 16.2 million in 2010, but its network has been struggling with fluctuating data speeds and dropped calls.
The number two player, Airtel, has more than doubled its subscriber base since 2010 to 4.9 million from 1.83 million and it has slipped on the quality ranking from last year’s 75 per cent and to 62.5 cent. Airtel together with Safaricom were poor in completing calls countrywide, according to the CCK.
Call completion parameter measures the number of calls that are connected satisfactorily compared to the total number of call attempts made by callers. Safaricom also had the highest blocked calls rate while the other three were compliant. None of the operators met the required quality of speech.
“We have issues with quality of our network in urban areas, especially in Nairobi where we experience drop calls,” said Bob Collymore, the CEO of Safaricom, adding that the firm has lined up billions of shillings to upgrade its network.
Its rivals have also announced multi-billion shilling upgrade plans to capture the surge in demand for data services and boost voice quality.
“We inherited a 10 year old network which the previous owners had not upgraded and this has affected our plan for rolling out products such as the 3G network,” said Airtel Kenya managing director Shivan Bhargava said last week as he announced a Sh8 billion upgrade plan. India’s Bharti Airtel bought a 95 per cent stake in the Kenyan unit in mid-2010.
