Telecom Firms Increase Tariffs By 9%

The quality of mobile phone service provided by the five licensed Telecom companies in operation in the country fell short of expectation as of the first four months of this year, the Telecom regulator has reported.

At the same time, mobile phone operators increased their call tariffs by an industry average of about nine percent to GH¢ 0.01299. The National Communication Authority (NCA) in its first quarter report for this year said even though all the mobile cellular operators complied with their license conditions on call completion, call congestion and call-drop, the quality of service dropped marginally during the quarter.

According to the report, the average call completion rate for the industry declined marginally from 93.97 per cent in the last four months of last year to 93.47 percent during the period under review.

The report said the call congestion rate also worsened during the period; that is, the rate increased from an industry average of 0.20% during the last quarter of 2009 to 0.38% by March 2010.

More so, the average call drop rate for the industry was 1.42 percent against the license condition of three percent. “With the exception of Vodafone and MTN, all other interconnect routes operated under the utilisation rate of 80 percent.

“Average cost of making local calls within networks was GH¢0.01299, an increase of GH¢0.0108 from the fourth quarter of 2009. This was due to an increment in the tariff by TiGo on-net calls.

“However, compared to a year ago, the average cost of making on- net calls was GH¢ 0.0030 less. The average end-user tariff for Data Services (2G, 3G, etc.) increased from 0.331 per megabyte in the last quarter to 0.3988 megabyte during the quarter under review,” it said.
The NCA reported that it has issued directives to operators who are still non-compliant to rectify the anomalies in their networks or face sanctions.

Currently, there are six licensed mobile phone operators in the country with a combined market share of 16.8 million subscribers as of the end of May this year, according to statistics released by the NCA.

However, there has been a rise in the wave of complaints from mobile phone subscribers resulting from continued call-drops, cross-calls, speech mutation, and wrong voice prompts, among others.

Source: Evans Boah-Mensah