Category: e-Business

An indigenous submarine cable company, MainOne, official has accused the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) of looking the other way when major operators engage in anti-competitive practices that are capable of killing small players.

Telecoms sector analysts complain of the weak regulation, insisting that the regulator is a toothless bulldog that could only bark.

An official of the firm,Kemi Adeyanju, who spoke in Lagos, lamented that in the submarine cable market, there are other operators providing the same services, arguing that these operators have core retail and wholesale businesses integrated. He added that they also have infrastructure.

“The challenge we face regarding last mile services puts us at a disadvantage and indicates that our segment is not competitive. We have had experience where our competitors sell services in Abuja and Lagos at the same price, they refuse to share infrastructure with us, and most times give infrastructure away to other players in the market,” she lamented.

According to her, the refusal to share infrastructure is one way of ensuring that the competitor is driven out of business, adding that this could take the form of deliberately increasing the price of access to infrastructure – bearing in mind that the central objective of most interconnection policies is the principle of non- discriminatory.

She lamented that the various anti-competitive practices being carried out with impunity despite the existence of rules and regulations barring such. She urged the NCC to demonstrate commitment to restore the confidence of operators in the market.

“Rules currently exist in the Acts and Regulations but needs to be enforced. The Commission needs to demonstrate commitment to restore operator’s confidence as they are reluctant to come forward not to ruffle any nest of the big operators whilst nothing will be done to the big player and the complaining operator will then be victimised by the big operator,” she said.

Adeyanju wants the NCC to invoke its investigative responsibility, set up Special Competition Tribunal, simplify the procedure for complaining and resolving issues in realistic timelines and put punitive remedies such as fines, compensation, suspension of licences, publication of names of operators engaging in these acts among other recommendations.

She identified increased costs of providing services by way of high price to end users, duplication of infrastructure, creation of a dominant operator, erection of barrier to market entry and enhancement of the quick exit of smaller/new operators as the evils of anti-competitive practices. These, she said, also discourage investment, impact the quality of service and is responsible for low level of broadband penetration in the country.

Adeyanju said the laws cover all these areas but only needed to be enforced by the NCC.

But the NCC said it has engaged the services of foremost consultancy firm, KPMG, to carry out an assessment of the current level of competition in the telecoms industry.

Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Eugene Juwah, said at a forum that the commission was committed to remaining vigilant to ensure sustainability and fair competitive practices in the industry.

Juwah, who was represented by a Commissioner from the commission, Mrs. Biodun Olujimi, said: “Obtaining empirically verifiable information on this competition issue is fundamental to the development of regulatory initiatives to prevent anti competitive practices and deepen competition in the industry. The result of the study will go a long way to ensuring confidence and certainty in all players in the various markets over unfair practices of their competitors.”

President, Institution of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), Chris Uwaje, has condemned the absence of investment on research and development in the country, warning that no nation can make progress in technology without investing in it.

Uwaje who spoke at a workshop organised by the Nigeria Computer Society (NCS) on Computer Science/Information Technology at the University of Lagos.

He lamented that with about 70 per cent population growth that makes the country to stand at number eight in global rankings of the most populous countries, it is sad that it cannot innovate for the communication technology, adding that the nation ought to earn technology and not to wish for it.

He said delivering ICT could change the government’s policies, education, and industry through research and development.

Uwaje charged the Federal Government to fund reserach for the growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), adding that the country cannot be viable enough if it does not invest in research, which would bring about creativity and innovation.

He said the networked world now demands a workforce that will understand how to use technology as a tool for increased productivity and creativity, adding that the academia, the government and industry should collaborate to establish a national database of teaching resources and a network of facilitators to support and sustain life. He charged the NCS to research on a super computer for the country.

President, NCS, Sir Ademola Aladekomo, said the workshop was designed to hone the skills and propagate the development of information technology and research.

He said the group has put mechanisms in place that would spur interest in ICT among youths. This, he said, is through organising competitions for pupils in secondary schools to bring out the best in them.

Aladekomo decried the dearth of research equipment nationwide and urged the industry to fund the university system for research.

Prof.Nike Osofisan said every child is a potential researcher and a scientist, adding that parents should expose their children to creativity and technology at a tender age.

Teachers in Lagos State public schools may soon get laptop from the state government, Aebiyi Fatai Mabadeje, the Commissioner for Science and Technology, has said.

He spoke during the opening ceremony of ICT Curriculum Workshop for Secondary Schools Teachers in the state at Digital Village, said 120 schools in the state now have ICT Labs where students go in and take practical lectures.

“We will look at the request by the teachers for laptops. Clearly, it is something we would like to do for them and we are glad that they are asking,” he said, adding that it is a clear manifestation that the teachers have acquired a skill, which they intend to take forward.

On the provision of personal computers in schools to facilitate teaching, he said: “What we traditionally do is to create what we call an ICT Lab in the school equipped with computers, which the teachers can use to teach the students. It is a shared resource where, whenever they have the students have their ICT classes, they go in and take lectures. It is like a common room where there are computers with internet access. We have done about 120 schools, we intend to do more. It’s in phases, the first being for secondary schools.”

He said the workshop was designed to upgrade the skills and knowledge of teachers in the state and improve the performance of pupils, especially in internal, external examinations and provide platforms for interactions for teachers to brainstorm and evolve better ways of handling and imparting knowledge.

“This is because the goal and determination of the present administration is to provide qualitative and functional education consistent with our socio-economic and technological needs and to adequately equip our children and youths for global challenges in the future,” he said.

According to the commsisoner, training and retraining is the bedrock of professionalism and ICT brings more it as it allows for adequate research, online classes, advance learning softwares and latest graphic illustrations.

“The adminstration is committed to science and technology education because they have been proved to be an effective panacea to rid our society of ignorance, backwardness and underdevelopment. It is seen as a veritable tool and vehicle for socio-economic and political transformation of our society.

“It is seen by this administration as the basis upon which our policies as highlighted in the 10-point agenda are laid,” he said. One of the greatest possibilities for the country he added, will be her ability to utilise the power IT to assemble and analyse relevant data for meaningful planning and policy implementation.”

Bowing to the avalanche of complaints from subscribers, the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) recently banned telecoms service providers from doing promotions and lotteries on their networks. But subscribers insist NCC should move beyond that and compel operators to compensate them for the long period of poor service delivery. LUCAS AJANAKU reports

If Onyekachi Aguomuo, a lawyer, had an option, his recent experience with his global system for mobile (GSM) communication service provider would have made him to stop using mobile phone. He had re-united with four colleagues with whom he did the Advanced Level General Certificate of Education (GCE) at the Federal School of Arts and Science, Sokoto, between 1986 and 1988.

He was so excited about the re-union that the he immediately put a call across to his wife to share the joy with him. For so long, he tried without success. When what appeared like respite came his way, he was dumbfounded to hear: “The number you have called is incorrect. Please check it and call again.”

He was frustrated, especially when his service provider told him that he no longer knew the number of his wife. “I was shocked to hear that. I scrolled through the phone and double-checked the number and when I was convinced that the number was correct, I dialled again. The call came through but the joy of getting to talk to her evaporated like soap bubbles when the conversation snapped when she had hardly spoken with one of them,” Aguomuo told The Nation.

He said the operators were acting with impunity, wondering if there was no law to check their excesses.

Felix Momodebe, a Computer Engineering graduate of the Lagos State University (LASU) also has a bitter experience with his service provider. A National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member in Osun State, he was “broke” and needed to make calls to his parents in Kogi State. After many fruitless attempts to call his mummy’s number, he tried that of his uncle. With only N50 worth of airtime on his phone, he dialled the number of his uncle only for his operator to divert the call to another person. “All I heard from the other end was that you have dialled a wrong number. By the time I checked the credit on my phone, it had depleted. I was livid with anger because the call I intended putting across to my parents was that of a child in distress. I had no money on me and our ‘allowee’ was not ready,” he complained.

The experience of Aguomuo and Momodebe are but few of the over 105 million telecoms subscrbers in Nigeria that daily pass through one form of agony or the other in their efforts to use their mobile phones owing to congestion on the network. As a matter of fact, sector analysts say persistent congestion on the network has led to break down in marriages while business opportunities have also been lost.

Momodebe carpeted the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for not doing enough to protect the subscribers. “The NCC ought to do more than it is doing by ensuring that the consumers are adequately protected. It should not have stopped at stopping promos and lotteries, it should have gone further by asking the operators to compensate their subscribers as it happened during the days of his predecessor,” he said, adding that none of the big players is living up to the expectation of their subscribers.

For Aguomuo, the reign of impunity that has been the hallmark of operators of GSM in the country is disturbing. According to him, whenever a subscriber buys a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM), activates and loads it with recharge card, a contract is entered into between the subscriber and the operator, adding that any breach of that contract by way of poor service quality is intolerable. “The regulator, having established, through the appropriate unit, that the contract has been breached should step in and impose sanction on the erring party,” he said, adding that compensating subscrbers for long period of poor service is not out of the point at this time.

Network congestion in the country has further been worsened by the cut-throat competition the operators are engaged in. They promise aircraft, luxury bus and various goodies, including almost 500 per cent free talk time, which had inevitably led to congestion of the network, leading to unauthorised call diversion and routing calls into voice mails.

Experts say network congestion causes poor reception, drop calls, poor voice signal as well as clogging of interconnect routes between networks.

Regulators’ perspective

Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs Omobola Johnson, said she is also worried by the situation of things as hardly a day passess without people complaining. “I am quite aware of the poor quality of service, which seems to be getting worse by the day. Quality of service is probably one of the biggest issues that the industry is dealing with right now and it is important that consumers understand what the issues are and what the Ministry and NCC, the regulator, are doing about it. At present, the telecoms industry has some problems with the inadequate number of base stations, arbitrary cost and lengthy process of right of way acquisition, persistent interruptions as they try to lay cables even after obtaining right of way, wilful and accidental damage to fibre optic cables and base stations and ofcourse illegal taxes and levies by a number of state and local governments all of which work together to affect quality of service,” she said, adding that she has studied at the newly gazetted quality of service indicators which has these challenges and problems built into it.

“We are not asking for 99.9 per cent network uptime or a zero per cent call drop rate or 100 per cent successful call set up. For this reason, I have asked the NCC to start the process of not only publishing performance on quality of service by operator per month but also impose meaningful penalties on operators that do not meet the targets set. Performance and penalties will be published on NCC websites monthly. In other words, there shall be consequences for network operators that do not meet this quality of service indicators. I don’t believe that there is any self-respecting company that wants to be constantly and continously penalised by its regulator; so it is expected that this singular action will result in more effort being placed on improving quality of service by all network operators,” she added.

Stakeholders’ perspective

President of the Nigeria Internet Group (NIG), Bayo Banjo, blamed the development on the era of weak regulation. Acording to him, the regulator, the NCC has become a toothless bulldog that could only bark. Banjo, who is the immediate past vice president, Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), argued that the practice in developed countries is that the government approaches the issue with a stick and carrot.

He said like what happened in the financial sector, any erring telco chief should be shown the way out.

For the Chief Executive Officer,Teledon Group,Dr. Emmanuel Ekuwem, the situation could truncate the Vision 20:2020 programme of the Federal Government. He lamented that in this information age, anything that would hinder the free flow of information and spread of knowledge would do collateral damage to the nation.

He blamed the problem on “low capacity”and the refusal of the operators to plough back substantial part of their mega profits into expanding the network.

But President, National Association of Telecom Subscribers (NATCOMS), Deolu Ogunbanjo,disagrees with subscribers over demand for compensation. According to him, the operators should be given another three-month window within which to do the right thing, especially when it was realised that early in the year, the NCC had fined them N1.17 billion for failing to comply with the minimum standard of quality of service.

While MTN and Etisalat coughed out N360 million each, Airtel and Glo paid N270 million and N180 million to the Federal Government.

But operators say they were not responsible for the problem. President, Association of Licenced Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ALTON) Gbenga Adebayo, said bombs and floods had affected quality service provison in the country.

According to him, the incidents affected over 250 Base Transceiver Stations (BTS) that lost connection (due to primary and secondary impact) and many suffered significant damage beyond repairs. Added to this is the usual resort to closing BTS by agents of the government over refusal to pay charges that are not known to law, adding that when one base station is closed, it affects others because of the inability to connect calls from the closed BTS.

While Director, Public Affairs, NCC, Tony Ojobo, said the agency was monitoring the performance of the operators since they and the regulator have agreed to key performance indicators (KPIs), which they must not go below, subscribers say the horse must have starved to death before the grass grows.

An indigenous ICT firm, Teledon Group, has introduced a modern learning and teaching equipment, Smart Classroom to redefine teaching and learning in schools.

Speaking at the unveiling of the products, Dr Emmanuel Ekuwem, chief executive officer of the firm, said the advantages of the innovation are: students would have an audio-visual copy of each lecture, a development, which, he said, allows for ease of revision.

“Smart Classroom is a technology enhanced classroom that boosts the quality of teaching and learning by leveraging on technology such as computers, specialised software, audience response technology, videoconferencing platform, digital podium, networking, interactive smartboard, multimedia projector, LCD TV, DVD player/recorder, USB duplicator, SATA storage devices,” he explained to The Nation in Lagos.

According to him, it comprises automated teaching, learning processes where lectures are recorded for date and time specific playback, making revision and assimilation a pleasant experience.

He said the advantages include allowing the teacher to produce and modify resources quickly and easily, real-time access to internet-based information and resources, allowing access to a wide range of information in different formats, multimedia enrichment of the senses of the students for high assimilation and allowing teachers to use different drafts to assess how work is progressing and what input is needed.

“By having recorded classroom sessions for future playback, complacency on the part of teachers is eradicated, hence, there will be a remarkable improvement in the way teachers teach,” he added.

Minister of Communication Technology, Mrs. Omobola Johnson, has launched the students PC ownership scheme with the theme: “promoting increased access and utilisation of ICTs in education”. The initiative was launched in conjunction with the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) in Abuja.

A statement by the ministry, quoted Mr Johnson as saying that the scheme is a collaborative and mutually beneficial effort among PC assemblers, universities, banks, global technology companies and telecoms companies.

‘’This initiative is entirely technology driven and contributes to the growing number of e-commerce initiatives that will move us to the desired digital, diversified, productive and efficient economy,’’ she said.

She informed participants at the launch that the technology used to power the initiative was developed by a group of extremely talented Nigerian software developers- a testament to the fact that Nigerians can develop a viable and vibrant local software industry catering to the nation’s domestic needs and exportable to other markets.

Mrs. Johnson decried the low PC penetration in Nigeria which is ranked the lowest in Africa. She added that affordability and availability of the devices and the slow pace by which ICTs were being adopted for teaching and learning in secondary and tertiary institutions was partly responsible for the low PC penetration in the country.

Airtel Nigeria has condemned the approval granted three distressed Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to merge.

The development, it warned, was capable of giving undue advantage to that segement over Global System for Mobile (GSM) communication by unleashing anti-competition practices.

Shola Adeyemi of Airtel’s Regulatory Affairs Department, who spoke in Lagos, also faulted the non-delineation of the telecoms market before the study on the levels of competition in the industry. He argued that the action amounted to putting the cart before the horse.

He said: “The proposed merger by the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) operators (Multilink, MTS and Starcomms), which will establish a single national Long Term Evolution (LTE) broadband operator is an action capable of giving the CDMA operators a competitive advantage over GSM operators who are unable to launch LTE services in Nigeria owing to the dearth of spectrum and until release of the Spectrum in 2015 as announced by the NCC.”

He warned that the devlopment might result in the CDMA operators having a dominant position in the broadband market.

Adeyemi, who spoke at NCC Stakeholder’s Forum, lamented the impact of interconnect debts on GSM operators.

He said: “Some CDMA operators do not comply with the terms of the Interconnect Agreements and are owing GSM operators substantial amounts as Interconnect debts. This act has an impact on the operators’ cash flow and network expansion projects as well as increases operators’ bad debt exposure.

“The Commission’s inability to intervene and compel the CDMA operators to pay their debts is spurring them to act with impunity thereby distorting the telecommunications market. It is noteworthy to mention that failure to comply with Interconnection obligations under the Competition Practices Regulations 2007 is a conduct deemed to be substantial lessening of competition.”

Adeyemi recalled that the NCC informed operators in September 2012 that it was conducting a study on the level of competition in the industry and that it had appointed KPMG as its consultants.

He said: “We are concerned that the Commission did not clearly state the specific market in focus and the purpose of the study.(Section 20 of the Competition Practices Regulations, 2007 requires the Commission before examining potential dominance in telecommunications markets to define the relevant markets).”

Adeyemi recalled that when a similar exercise was conducted by the Commission in 2008/2009, leading to the determination on dominance in selected markets in 2010, the market areas in focus were identified prior to the examination of dominance.

“In our view, it is only after a proper market delineation has been carried out that an in-depth market review can be conducted to enable the Commission determine the level of competition as well as whether telecoms operators hold a position of dominance, and, if so whether they are abusing this position by acting in a manner that substantially lessens competition,” he said, adding that the telco has it doors opened to discuss other anti-competitive practices directly with the regulator and consultants.