By Nana Appiah Acquaye, Accra, Ghana
The National Communications Authority (NCA) says it has sanctioned Ghana’s sixth network operator, Glo, for failing in its Call Setup Time obligation within the Greater Accra region. This is the second time Glo Ghana had been slapped with a sanction. The first one was in 2013 where it was fined a whopping amount of GHc200,000 for defaulting Call Setup Time, Call Completion and Signalling Congestion obligations in the Central and Western Regions.
Call Setup Time is the period of time elapsing from the sending of a complete destination address (target telephone number) to the setting up of a call to the receiving terminal.
In its Quality of Service (QoS) Report covering the month of February this year released by the regulator on its official website this month, revealed that Glo had Call Setup Time delays at Abokobi, Adenta, Dodowa, La, Prampram, Sege and Teshie-Nungua, but never gave reasons why the sanction against Glo, since there were other networks including Airtel, Ghana who performed badly in Call Setup Time in eight (8) suburbs, higher than Glo who performed badly in only seven (7) within the Greater Accra Region. Airtel had Call Setup Time delays at Adenta, Gbawe, La, Prampram, Sege, Sowutuom,Tema and Teshie-Nungua.
One cannot understand why Airtel Ghana was not sanctioned but only granted moratorium till May 2016 to resolve the persistent Call Setup Time delays which had been acute since 2015 by the National Communications Authority if only such punitive action was based solely on Call Setup Time and not other categories of inspection.
While Tigo had delays in Accra and Gbawe, Ghana’s leading telecom giant MTN Ghana had a delay in only one major town, Dodowa, also in Greater Accra Region.
The National Communication Authority in pursuance of Annexure D1 and D2 of the Cellular Mobile Licence of Telecommunications Operators licence obligations, conducts Quality of Service (QoS) monitoring and accesses indicators and their respective threshold for compliance under assessment considering the user’s perspective.
