By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Sierra Leone's telecoms regulator has fined Airtel US$ 1.2 million “for poor service delivery”. The fine must be paid within the next seven working days.
National Telecommunications Commission (NATCOM) boss, Momoh Konte says the country's oldest mobile phone company has consistently failed to meet with international standards of mobile service provision.
He said he was positive the payment deadline would be met but that if it was not the commission would have to meet and pursue another course of action.
AIRTEL has not yet responded to the fine saying it was consulting.
The NATCOM boss said their engineering department had already written a letter of notification to Airtel since October, 2015 for the conduct of an audit on the mobile company’s billing system. He defended their action saying they had a responsibility to protect both operators and consumers.
Already they have stopped Airtel from using data charging services like “Pay As You Go”, this is so because they believe the service exploited
subscribers.
The Deputy Director General of NATCOM, Victor Findley, said they used six KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) to asses Airtel’s quality of service. They included an agreed 95% call handover success rate per month, a call congestion rate of less than 1.5% per month, and an acceptable 2% drop call rate per month.
Findley told Politico at the fringes of the press conference: “The commission had been monitoring Airtel’s performance to these rates since February 2015.”
Many AIRTEL subscribers have welcomed the news hoping it would help improve service. Mohamed Massaqoui, an Airtel subscriber for five years, said he had been looking forward to such an action by NATCOM for a long time.
“As a customer, I feel happy that action has bene taken at long last,” Massaqoui said.
However, many subscribers like Massaqoui hope this action will not just stop at one mobile company and that other companies will be closely monitored. The French company, ORANGE, recently announced takeover of Airtel. It is not clear how this will impact that.
(C) Politico Online 11/03/16
