Study shows GSM services have stagnated
bit.ly
It is a conclusion many Nigerian phone users will agree with. Some scholars at the American University of Nigeria have said a recent study of theirs shows that the Nigerian telecommunication industry has stagnated, with the telecoms operators not making significant efforts to provide adequate infrastructure to back the rising number of their customers.
Augustine Odinma and other members of the university's Telecommunications Department said their findings show that the country's GSM networks are still plagued by persistent congestion, inconsistent and poor quality services.
The study, which highlighted many of the common operational lapses associated with GSM telecommunication, noted that these challenges were likely to pose "dismal consequences for the future of the telecommunication industry nationwide."
"The quality of mobile calls after a decade that 2G became commercially available in Nigeria is still very disturbing," Mr Odinma said.
"You may wake up some days and find that there is no signal in your phone. This ugly situation could remain for a couple of days. Your phone may be working in the morning, but for two or three hours in the afternoon you may not be able to make calls."
The study, which was conducted in Abuja and Lagos as big-city samples, and in Yola to represent the small-city, found that GSM services was even poorer in smaller cities.
The don said the research was primarily to find answers to the myriad of complaints from some his students in Yola, especially regarding the poor quality of service.
"I told them that we could actually carry out a performance evaluation of the operators, similar to the one I did in Lagos in 2005. The students took the challenge and we decided to research the performance of the operators' services in Lagos, Abuja and Yola," Mr. Odinma said.
He said the results for 2011 were compared with that of 2005 and it was surprising that congestion has remained on the rise, six years later.
Behave responsibly
The research team included Jude Okwuibe, Ridwan Naibi, Joshua Shawulu, Emmanuel Chukwudozie, Khadija Masanawa and Iniabasi Udobong, Mr. Odinma said a majority of the most recurrent error messages analysed, network by network, "are symptomatic problems of congestion" arising from overloading of the operators' network systems with call requests.
The field study embraced MTN, Glo, Airtel, Etisalat and Visafone whose SIM cards the researchers bought eight days before the commencement.
According to the study, one of the networks could not be tested in Yola because of their complete absence.
"A truly national operator should have presence in at least each state capital after over four years it gained its license," the research team said.
The team called on the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to get the operators to behave responsibly, saying the ongoing SIM card registration has added another layer to the suffering faced by mobile users in the smaller cities, such as Yola.
"The registration and activation of SIM cards for MTN and Airtel took beyond seven days in Yola. This has led to some level of corruption on the part of their agents or employees, who expect some gratification before they would upload the registration request to head office," the report said. |
