Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, Dr. Eugene Juwah has said the latest sanctions on three service providers is the necessary step to arrest the continued failure by operators to meet with the regulations on Key Performance  Indicators, KPI, for acceptable quality of services in the country.

NCC had on Monday slammed a total fine of N647.5 million on Airtel, Globacom and MTN Nigeria, the three major GSM service providers for failing to meet the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for quality of service in the month of January 2014.

Juwah who spoke to a cross section of the press at the ongoing Mobile World Congress at Gran Fira in Barcelona, Spain, said the Commission has endured a period of 18 months during which it reduced the KPIs for the operators but regretted there was no significant improvement from the three operators as they promised.

“We have to take a more drastic action to improve user experience in the network. There are issues with capacity of the networks, and it would appear that the service providers load up the network as soon as there is some expansion. The issue with capacity must be resolved for user experience to improve.”, he said while visiting exhibition stands at the biggest mobile forum and exhibition in the world.

He said after the first round of sanctions in 2012, the Commission had reached understanding with all the service providers that the KPI’s upon which they were sanctioned should be reduced over a period of 18 months during which the service providers will make significant improvement through provision of more infrastructure  and achieve a progressive improvement in quality of service.

“We are a listening regulator. For 18 months, we waited and we said, no fine. We lowered the KPIs.  We listened to them, and we took notes on all the issues. Gave advice where needed. But we did not see the results in  user experience and even the readings upon which they were sanctioned were obtained from their switches. It means that we have to hold them to their promise and we have to get back to the original KPIs as prescribed by the regulations”, he said.

Juwah said the sanction is not about understanding the issues causing the poor quality of service but implementing the regulations addressing quality of service. He said it would appear that any improvement that operators make in expanding the network is followed with loading up the systems,  which results in continued negative indication on quality of service without recourse to the provisions of the regulation on QoS.

The NCC boss said going forward, the Commission will establish secondary switches that will capture user experience after which it will compare the results with those of drive tests such that engineers from the service providers will also see the user experience as it concerns quality of service.

“We have been on this for too long. User experience must improve. We will not sacrifice the enormous successes recorded in the industry to continued poor quality of service.  As a regulator, we must take action and that is the reason for the sanction which is a prescription of a regulation.

He said after the sanctions which includes stoppage of promotions on the networks, in addition to barring them from admitting more customers in the month of March, 2014, the Commission will continue to take the necessary steps towards addressing issue of QoS until it is resolved in the interest of the consumers.