Category: Infotech

Global telecommunications technology provider, Ericsson has called on the regulator of the telecoms sector, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), to enforce mandatory infrastructure sharing, especially in the rural areas, to deepen telecoms penetration and improve quality of service (QoS).

Its Managing Director (Nigeria), Kamar Abass, said there is passive infrastructure sharing, stressing that active infrastructure sharing will do the industry good.

He spoke during the unveiling of Ericsson Mobility Report in Lagos, adding that though the sector is expected to keep growing through the years, “poor network coverage remains a cause for concern.”

Abass said with more than 130 million subscribers, it will be wrong to feel held back by infrastructure challenge, adding that the country has got to the advanced stage of base transmission station (BTS) management. He who said Ericsson manages about 11,000 out of the over 20,000 BTS in the country, insisted that power availability is about 90 per cent, at the BTS adding that the networks will keep on getting smarter with improved technology.

He said: “As telecommunication technologies become a central part of the way businesses and society function, key stakeholders in the region such as government and network providers need to put resources in place that assist in dealing with consumer demand

“More spectrums will need to be allocated to support networks as their capacity is not growing as fast as the increase in data traffic.”

In the report, the firm said by the end of this year, there will be over 635 million subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa which is predicted to rise to around 930 million by the end of 2019, stressing that there was an ongoing data revolution, with traffic growth doubling past years.

It said by 2019, there would be 557 million smartphones in use and 710 million broadband subscriptions.

The Mobility Report shows that this year, phone users accessed 76,000 Terabyte (Tb) of data per month – double that of last year’s figure of 37,500 TB per month.

In 2015, the figures are expected to double again with mobile phone users accessing 147,000 TB per month.

Ericsson disclosed that the rise of social media, content-rich apps and video content accessed from a new range of cheaper smartphones had prompted the rise.

Regional Head of Ericsson, sub-Saharan Africa, Fredrik Jejdling, said consumers in  Nigeria,  South Africa and Kenya were also increasingly using video-television and media services from their smartphones.

“Sub-Saharan Africa is currently undergoing a mobile digital revolution with consumers, networks and even media companies wakening up the possibilities of 3G and 4G technology.

“We have seen the trend emerging over a few years but in the past 12 months, the digital traffic has increased over 100 per cent forcing us to revise our existing predictions,” Jejdling said.

The report’s findings show that in the next five years, the voice call traffic in sub-Saharan Africa will double and there will be an explosion in mobile data which will grow 20 times between 2013 and 2019, twice the anticipated global expansion

The liberalisation of the telecoms sector more than a decade ago unleashed a phenomenal growth. Mobile phones are increasingly becoming more affordable; subscribers have reached the 130 million mark. However, subscribers are daily reporting loss of money through subterranean moves by service providers, reports LUCAS AJANAKU .

Mrs. Mercy Adeniran, a widow and mother of three, uses her mobile phone only to receive calls. If there is any need for her to make any voice calls, she will buy air time of N100 and ensure she exhausts it immediately. Gone are the days when she used to buy airtime of N2,000.

“Each time I load my phone, I discover that my ‘credit’ gets wiped off. I don’t know how it happens but it kept on happening. So frustrated, I called the customer care line of my service provider. After several trials, a female voice that introduced herself as Joy picked my call after 30 minutes of being compelled to listen to music. Joy took my details and promised to fix the error. She never did so I feel the best thing to do is to stop loading,” she said.

Another subscriber who identified himself as Chukwudi Ibe said he became frustrated with the speed with which he was losing his airtime, despite not making calls, browsing the internet nor using the short message service (SMS) platform. So, when mobile number portability (MNP) was launched by the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) last year, he felt relieved as he will have an opportunity to dump his ‘thiefing’ service provider.

He was, however, disappointed that his efforts to port out was decidedly frustrated by his operator.

The experience of Mrs. Adeniran and Chukwudi are but a few of such. Many subscribers just buy airtime which they rarely enjoy. They pick their mobile phones in the hope that they have enough airtime only to discover the airtime has been wiped off.

According to findings, revenue from voice calls forms a significant portion of the balance sheet of mobile network service providers. Data is another growth frontier but it is still not doing well. It is, however, expected to pick up after the spectrums are freed by broadcast on completion of digitalisation are auctioned, to do longer term evolution (LTE) or 4G.  So, operators make more money when people talk and talk on the network.

From the experiences of customers, they are fleeced in one or two of the following ways.

 

Forced alerts

Some operators are in the habit of imposing alerts on their subscribers. Such alerts are either on football, Bible or fashion.

The operators take advantage of the high unemployment rate in the country to also force job alerts on their customers. There are alerts on virtually everything, from health tips and weather forecast for which their accounts are debited on a monthly basis.

The operators usually lure their customers to try it and by the time they do, they get their fingers burnt.

 ‘Flashing’ with conventional numbers

Operators often fleece their subscribers by  using the conventional 11-digit mobile telephone numbers to ‘flash’ them.

The idea is that when the unsuspecting subscribers see the ‘flashing’, they inevitably mistake it for a missed call from their loved ones. For subscribers, especially those with kids and other dependants that were temporarily separated by the need to take care of the family, the immediate impulse is usually to return the call because any of the kids could have used the mobile phone of his colleague to flash mummy or daddy. When such calls are returned, one usually gets disappointed that the call was indeed from the operator.

A victim of the trick, Madam Esther said: “I have three kids in school out of Lagos. When they are broke, they sometimes use their friend’s or teacher’s mobile phone to ‘flash’ me so that I could call them. I have called such numbers a couple of times only to discover that it was from my operator.”

 

Billing without call

It has become the practice with some of the operators to also send bills to their subscribers for calls not made. Such bills are quietly sent intermittently in sums that are negligible and will not excite the curiosity of the subscriber. For instance, it could be as low as N10 but it could be sent about four or five times daily.

Another version of this kind of billing is made when calls are made but not successful. Though the device will say something such as “the number you have called is not available” but you still get billed at the end of the day.

Data services bill

Data services ought to be optional for subscribers. So it is curious when operators send bills intermittently to their subscribers that they have spent X Y Z amount of money accessing the internet.

Curiously, these bills are sometimes sent to the mobile phones of people who are barely literate and could hardly think of configuring their mobile phones to access the internet.

“When I bought my Nokia Asha phone recently, my service provider sent internet setting configuration to me no sooner I had I inserted my subscriber identity module (SIM). I am sure that I did not try browsing the internet with the phone because I already have a Blackberry on which I access data but I continued to receive bills. Calls to my operator have failed to stop it,” another subscriber said.

 

Ring back caller tunes

Forced ring back caller tune is another way the operators short-change the customers.  The operators first give the subscribers the impression that the service is going to be free but as soon as the subscriber enters the code, opting out becomes a problem and deduction for such services is the first the service providers go for at the end of the month.

Though the regulator of the sector, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) mandated the operators to provide short codes for dissatisfied customer to opt out of such services, experience has shown that  it is better not to accept the Greek gift  at all because going out becomes a great problem to the subscribers. “My Daddy was shocked when he discovered that his caller ring back tune is our Lord’s Prayer. He initially asked me to help her opt out but after several attempts, he gave up the attempt. Since he is of the Roman Catholic faith, the paternoster becomes something that is not offensive to him,” Jerome said.

Particularly, the operators or valued added service (VAS) providers take advantage of the religious nature of the Nigerian society to fleece them. What they do is that the extract prayer points of general overseers of Pentecostal churches that have huge followership. They forcefully impose the prayers of such church leaders on the subscribers as ring back tunes.

 

Operator reacts

A technical person with one of the leading service providers in the country denied any wrong doing by the operators. According to him, some of these things happen to people out of sheer ignorance about the operation of their devices.

He said: “I am sure if you need the record of your calls and data usage, we will provide you with one stating date by date and minute by minute how you spent your airtime on our network. We do not short-change our subscribers.

“But all I know is that customers who do not subscribe to data bundle plans are usually advised to block their mobile data because if it is not blocked, it will be running. It is common with smartphones. When you have airtime on your smartphone and your data is not blocked, it connects automatically to the internet and the applications that are running on the internet will be speaking with the phones. This explains why sometimes you check your credit and discover it is no longer there.”

 

NATCOMS’ position

President, National Association of Telecoms Subscribers (NATCOMS), Deolu Ogunbanjo said alerts have also become a thing of great concern to the NCC. He said this has compelled the regulator to restrict the time operators send alerts to their customers.

“Caller tunes are a global practice. What we are going to do now is to step up education and enlightenment for subscribers not to accept some of the codes the operators send to them

For unsolicited data connection, Ogunbanjo said: “A lot of people have complained about data too. In the court process we are doing, we are asking the court to put in place proper consumer management process and put an era of sanctions in place too. If a subscriber complains, even when they accept liability, it takes them so long to right the wrongs. What we are pushing for is for a penalty that will have time limit attached. So if the time limit for that penalty is exceeded, it should attract further punishment,” he said.

Also, calls the Lagos office of Consumer Protection Council (CPC) was not picked.

Information technology (IT) security experts have said giving employment to ethical hackers will reduce, to the barest minimum, cybercriminals in the country.

An ethical hacker is a computer and network expert, who attacks a security system on behalf of its owners, seeking vulnerabilities that a malicious hacker could exploit.

According to experts at this year’s conference on IT security tagged “Hackcess Technology Security” in Lagos, to test the efficacy of a security system, ethical hackers use the same methods as others, but report problems instead of taking advantage of them to defraud organisations and persons.

Chief Technical Officer, Digital Encode, Oluseyi Akindeinde, said ethical hacking is all about helping to make the internet a safer place to do business while Enterprise System Engineer (Security), Cisco Systems, Adeola Kukoyi said 100 per cent of organisations ignorantly connect to domains that harbour malicious files and services.

Chief Operating Officer, Tobeit Consulting, Tobechi Ndubuaku said ethical hacking remains one of the ways to build trust in the cyberspace.

 Akindeinde said ethical hacking prevents identity theft and the leakage of other personal and corporate vital information, stressing that whenever an organisation identifies any security lacunae on its security network, it should take proactive steps to implement stronger security measures.

He said: “Hacker doesn’t break into networks one day, while they are attempting there are signs if you don’t understand how they work you won’t see those signs. Good people need to learn these skills to be able to use it to protect their organisations.

“Apart from companies, ethical hacking is also beneficial to help government and other corporate entities to protect major computer systems from being compromised in a way that national security would be challenged,” he said on the sideline of the security forum.

Kukoyi said though organisations have acknowledged security threats, they are still being held back that their security policies may be difficult to enforce because of changing business models.