Patricia Obo-Nai presenting proof of her claim Vodafone is best in Ghana
Vodafone Ghana says an independent study commissioned by the Vodafone Group on the performance or all telcos in Ghana shows that it is the best telecom operator in the country in terms of quality of service (QoS).
The study was conducted by UK-based telecoms consulting and service company, P3 Group, and paid for by the Vodafone Group. The full report has not been made public yet but Vodafone has put out excerpts of the report to support their claim.
According to them, the report was largely based on what Ghanaian telecom consumers said about their experience on their respective networks, specifically with respect to four main KPIs (key performance indicators), namely voice quality, call set up time, call drops and 3G internet download/upload speeds.
Vodafone said they are confident the results reflect the facts on the ground and is in line with the National Communications Authority’s QoS Report, which in the past saw Vodafone without a fine for over 15 consecutive months due to high performance.
Meanwhile the latest NCA QoS report published for September 2014 shows Vodafone recorded nine cases of poor call set up rates, which was worse than other networks. And it also recorded some cases of call congestion while other telcos were recording zero congestion cases.
The NCA’s report also shows all telcos are within the acceptable call drop rates, so no telco is really better than the other when it comes to that.
Vodafone however insisted that the P3 Report showed that currently, 99.9% of calls are set up within less than 10 seconds on Vodafone, that consumers say the voice quality on Vodafone was the best; that Vodafone recorded the least number of call drops, and data download speed averaged around 3.5mbps, while average upload speed was about 1.5mbps, the best in the country so far.
Campaign
The company has therefore launched a new campaign to promote the brand as the best in terms voice quality and 3G internet speeds.
As part of the campaign, the company has launched a new commercial spelling out its investments into the the network and the improved performance over the last three years.
Head of Technology at Vodafone Ghana, Patricia Obo-Nai told journalists the company has invested over $700million over the last three years into network expansion, improvement, resilience and capability and that is showing in the performance of the Vodafone network nationwide, which they intend to sell through the new campaign.
The investment means they have doubled the number of cell sites across the country in three years and have improved coverage from the 60% they came to meet to 80% over the period.
Patricia. Obo-Nai also noted that their 3G cell sites have also been increased significantly from 600 in 2009 to over 2,000 now, and so they have opened up speed capacity of the 3G network to 43.2mbps all things being equal.
“We have approval to invest more into the network so we can assure our customers that things will even get better going forward,” she said.
Patricia Obo-Nai said Vodafone would be more than happy to see the regulator go beyond just publishing QoS reports and actually name which telco is the best in the country as per the KPIs in the QoS “because we are confident will always stand out among the lot.”
Vodafone would not be the first telco to claim they are the best network in the country based of quality of service, but they are challenging other telcos to also show evidence of their claim to superiority.
Indeed, journalists question why Vodafone would base their claim on a study their mother company commissioned and paid for, but Patricia Obo-Nai argued the study was independent, and Vodafone Group has no interest in making claims about Vodafone Ghana that are not true because the group actually seeks candid and independent reports for its business decisions.
The report is not yet out for the public and the other telcos to actually see what it says about them, but Vodafone insists it is credible and reliable.
Pundits believe the other telcos will challenge the claim and demand to see the results and how the study was done. It is also expected that other telcos will also quote other reports to support their claim to be the best in the country.
Google tests on the responsiveness of Ghanaian-based websites on mobile devices has revealed that over 90% of government and public institutions’ websites are very mobile unfriendly.
The tests also showed the websites of two leading telcos, Vodafone and Tigo, and that of the ICT industry regulator, National Communications Authority were also mobile-unfriendly.
The tests were done by a team from Ghanaian Mobile App Developers and Industry Researchers Zottech and Stimuluz and it included 75 websites, mainly from the public sector.
In February, 2015 Google has introduced a new test tool for the responsiveness of websites on mobile devices. This is because the Search giant wanted all developers to make their sites mobile friendly by 21st April or be punished in Searches on Mobile.
The decision by Google was because it found that over 50% of Google Search is done with mobile devices (Smartphones and tablets) across the world.
The team therefore ran the web addresses of all 75 locally-based websites on the new Google Mobile Friendly Test Tool on http://goo.gl/d567kP. They also ran mobile device test using Samsung Galaxy S4 and a Samsung Galaxy tablet.
Out of 75 websites tested, 21 came out as mobile-friendly and 54 were either “not very mobile-friendly or not mobile-friendly at all.”
Divine Puplampu was the leader of the team that ran the tests and he told your authoritative Simcardblog some of the sites looked okay in the mobile device test but the Google said otherwise, so in those instances they took the Google test verdict.
He said the main challenges with the websites included difficulty in navigating those sites on mobile devices, small texts on the sites, being forced to do horizontal scrolling even in landscape device mode, and generally poor user experience.
The IT wizkid said the failure of those sites simply means they were not designed to be easily accessible on mobile devices.
“It is down to bad design and if the designers of those websites do not do anything about it fast Google is very soon going to stop prioritizing those websites in the results of Google Searches on mobile devices,” he said.
Top of the list of the websites that failed the test are the Ghana government website (www.ghana.gov.gh) and the website of the presidency (www.presidency.gov.gh) in that order.
The president’s personal website (www.johnmahama.com), and the biggest opposition NPP’s website (www.newpatrioticparty.org) also failed the test. Meanwhile, the website of the ruling NDC (www.ndc.org.gh) was not accessible at the time of the test.
Telco industry players failed too
Even the websites of communications Ministry (www.moc.gov.gh), the telecoms regulator, National Communications Authority (www.nca.org.gh), National Information Technology Agency (www.nita.gov.gh) and E-Service Ghana also failed the test.
The Telecoms Chamber website (www.telecomschamber.org) and interestingly, the websites of two top telcos, Vodafone (www.vodagone.com.gh) and Tigo (www.tigo.com.gh) also failed the mobile responsiveness tests.
Websites of the following public institutions are part of the few that passed the test:
The Attorney-General today asked to join the respondents in the suit against the implementation of the interconnect clearinghouse (ICH) policy in Ghana as the case is adjourned to April 30, 2015.
Obuasi West MP, Kwaku Kwarteng and Policy Research Expert Elijah Adansi-Bonnah filed a suit against the implementation of the ICH policy, asking the Human Rights Court to declare it “illegal, unconstitutional and unnecessary.”
They contended that the implementation of the ICH policy would interfere with their communication rights as mobile subscribers, because they have contracts with the various telcos but they do not have similar contracts with the ICH.
Moreover, the telcos have interconnect arrangements and infrastructure among themselves, which has made it possible for them to connect calls across networks for all these years.
The plaintiffs originally sued telecoms industry regulator, National Communications Authority (NCA), all six telecom operators in the country and the selected ICH operator, Afriwave Telecoms Ghana Limited.
But when the case went to the Human Rights Court today, a representative of the Attorney-General’s Department was in court and he asked to join the suit because the ICH policy is a government policy, which has Cabinet backing and presidential assent.
The Human Rights court, presided over by Mr. Justice EK Essel Mensah adjourned hearing till April 30, 2015 to allow the AG to file a proper response to the plaintiff’s charge.
The representative of the AG, who said he only stood in for a colleague on the case, asked for two weeks to file a response.
The plaintiffs were represented by Lawyer Thaddeus Sory, while the NCA was represented by Yoni Kolendi and Afriwave was represented by Lawyer Bruce Thompson from Gyan Chambers.
It is important to note that whereas the telcos are respondents in this case, they actually support the case of the plaintiffs, as they have been in public castigating the implementation of the ICH policy and calling for deeper and wider consultation.
Meanwhile, government, led by the Minister of Communications, recently opened a window for high level consultation with telcos and other industry players like the Wireless Applications Service Providers Association of Ghana (WASPAG), the Ghana Internet Service Providers Association (GISPA) and representatives from Parliament.
Simcardblog is reliably informed that consultations would be ongoing but that would still not prevent the ICH from taking off on time, which is latest June, 2015.
The National Communications Authority (NCA) says when the interconnect clearinghouse (ICH) takes off later this year it will facilitate the transfer of money across mobile wallets on the various telecom networks in the country.
At least three telcos, MTN, Airtel, and Tigo offer mobile money services in the country. But because of lack or interoperability, they are unable to link their respective platforms to ensure transfer of money from a wallet on one network to a wallet on another.
So far telcos are only able to transfer money between wallets on their respective networks, and or to generate tokens that can be sent via SMS to another network for a cash out. Indeed Tigo cash is also able to purchase airtime for a subscriber on another network. But transfers from wallet to wallet on different networks is still not possible yet.
As a result of that limitation among others, mobile money usage in the country is not growing as fast as mobile telecom service usage. Overall mobile telecom subscriptions in the country is now more then 30 million but total mobile money customers is hovering around five to six million.
Telecom analyst Fouad Chilabi, called on financial institutions to collaborate with telcos in the country to make mobile money transfers across networks possible, as panacea to boosting mobile money usage.
But an NCA official, in an exclusive message to your authoritative Simcardblog noted that the ICH will remove that limitation, because it will become a common platform for telcos to link to the Ghana Interbank Payment and Settlements System (GhIPSS) switches, to which all banks in the country are already connected.
He said “GhIPSS will do all the net credit and debits from the advice of reconciliation from the ICH on all mobile money transactions across networks.”
The NCA official said ICH would facilitate interoperability in many respects and linking telcos mobile money platforms to make across-network wallet to wallet transfer possible is just one of them.
Currently, mobile money licenses are issued by the Bank of Ghana to banks and they collaborate with telcos to establish mobile money platforms. This is because the bottom line is movement of money and banks are the only institutions authorized to hold cash in this country.
Indeed, in the Bank of Ghana roadmap towards a cashless/cash-lite society, the mobile money outfits of the various telcos are to be registered separately as financial institutions and be run as such.
When that happens, the mobile money license will go directly to the mobile money outfits of the telcos and they will be able to hold cash and move it between their customers both on and off net.
Pundit have however asked whether the mobile money outfits of the telcos would still need ICH to connect to GhIPSS after they have received their banking licenses.
But the NCA official insisted that so long as mobile money involves a mobile phone transaction, the ICH will capture it and send reconciliation to GhIPSS for settlements with banks “whether pure banks or telco banks.”
“You can carry out a mobile transaction without being captured by ICH,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Head of IT at GhIPSS, Kojo Ntim believes GhIPSS itself is a a single point of failure so he and his team micro manage the system 24/7 to ensure continuous service to its customers.
He expressed the hope that the ICH for the telecoms industry would also be monitored closely to ensure continuous efficiency at all times, as, like GhIPSS, a failure at the ICH could lead to grave consequences for many institutions within the ecosystem.
Tigo Ghana has gone on record as the first telco in Ghana to offer the latest Samsung Galaxy S6 and its edge version on its network.
The offer comes with free 15GB data and a flexible 12-month payment plan through Stanbic Bank Ghana.
Tara Squire is Head of Mobile at Tigo Ghana, and he told Simcardblog the introduction of the two variations of the Samsung Galaxy S6 was to continue to fulfill Tigo’s promise of promoting a “digital lifestyle” among Ghanaians of all social classes.
He noted that the initial introduction of the affordable but superior Samsung Galaxy handsets, in the famous “Drop That Yam” campaign, was to meet the digital lifestyle needs of a particular group of Ghanaians, and the Galaxy S6 range also come to meet the needs of a particular group.
Squire however noted that the S6 offer is designed to kill all excuses that prevent people from living a digital lifestyle, explaining that the flexible payment plan with Stanbic, the 15GB free for 12 months and the opportunity to use the free data on various channels on Tigo were carefully designed to make the user maximize the benefits from the device.
“We also have other channels like Tigo Cash, Deezer where people can stream and download loads of music and others to make customers enjoy the device and data package optimally,” he said.
He was confident that the digital lifestyle drive, manifesting in Drop That Yam, Tigo Big 6, the opening of Tigo Experience Centers across country and the new introduction of the Galaxy S6 range are yielding positive dividends in terms of voice and data subscriber growth.
Indeed, Tigo’s subscriber base witnessed consistent decline for greater part of last year, but it is showing a relatively strong growth this year, witnessing over 165,000 additional data subscribers in January 2015 alone, and some 69,000 plus growth in voice subscribers. Both voice and data market shares also went up marginally.
Pundits have said while telcos seek more revenue to survive, they are also playing into the hands of over the top (OTT) apps like Whatsapp, tango, viber, twitter and others, which threaten to reduce the otherwise better revenue they would have gotten from direct M2M or P2P activities on their networks.
But Tara Squire said Tigo would not deny its customers the opportunity to enjoy the digital lifestyle out of the fear of losing revenue to OTTs, but rather “we are innovating around the digital advancement to ensure that we satisfy with shareholders and customers.”
This is the second part of the article on the impact and cost of Dumsor (the ongoing acute power crisis in Ghana) on the entire telecom industry. In the first elaborated on how dumsor is harming the telecom operators. This second part will look at the impact on mobile value added service (VAS) providers, device dealers and infrastructure vendors; some fallout from the dumsor within the industry and implications for consumers
The impact of Dumsor on the telecom industry is not affecting only telcos. Their VAS and handset partners, infrastructure vendors and even device partners are also feeling the pinch. Some of the leading VAS players like TXTGhana, MobileContent, SMSGH said cost is becoming unbearable in both monetary and impact on quality of service terms. TXTGhana, for instance, said they spend at least GHC10,000 on fuel every month due to Dumsor. And they also pay their electricity bills. MobileComtent also said they spend a similar amount and that is twice what they used to spend before Dumsor started.
“We get power only once a week from 6am to 6pm. For the rest of the week we you generator sets and we run the generators set overnight every day to keep our servers working for our customers,” General Manager of MobileContent, Conrad Nyur said.
Equipment and technology vendors who actually install and manage infrastructure for the telcos are also complaining of how Dumsor slows them down even though they do not incur any direct financial cost. Public Relations Officer for Huawei Technologies Ghana, Gideon Obeng said “our clients (the telcos) are losing a lot of money because of Dumsor and that slows us down because we need regular power supply at the various sites of our clients to be able to work efficiently and on time.”
And their inability to install and attend to equipment in and on time is affecting quality of service badly. Lately the age old challenges of speech mutation, call drops, calls not going through, false voice feedback messages, and others are fast crippling back into the system again. It was not as if they left the system completely, but quality of service became much better. However, now it is getting really bad again.
Tecno Phones is one of the biggest brands in the country right now, and the sole dealer in Ghana is Mobile Zone. The company has won several awards for being the best mobile device distributor in the country. Its distribution network is par excellence. But Mobile Zone says sustaining that level of efficiency is now becoming very expensive due to Dumsor. They have several distribution vans and outlets across the country. Apart from the normal fuel they provide for the vans, they now depend on generator sets to power their outlets nationwide in times of Dumsor, and that, according to them, is fast becoming unbearable.
Power banks and charging services
But it would appear that while the mainstream players in the telecom industry are suffering from Dumsor, some individuals are also fast cashing in on the problem. Today power banks have become the in thing. Usually people would demand phones or tablets from relatives abroad. But lately they are increasingly asking for power banks to store power for phones and tablets charging in the days of Dumsor. Daniel Duedu is one of few individuals who import power banks in small quantities for sale in Ghana. He told this writer that even before his power bank consignments arrives, people would have ordered for them already. Some even pay for the devices before they arrive in the country.
Power banks are however for people who can afford them. Those who can’t usually resort to some recharge card dealers who have added device charging service to their business. They keep a number of power banks or power generators and charge devices for customers for a fee. Two of those service providers at Jamestown in Accra say they charge 50Gp for one fully charged phone; it does not matter how long it takes for the phone to be fully charged. One of them, Justice Mensah says he gets at least 40 customers a day so he makes a minimum of GHC20 daily. The other one, Suzzy Tetteh said she gets at least 15 customers a day and makes a minimum of GHC7.5. According to Suzzy, some customers keep their phones on charge from morning till 4pm when they close from work, and they still pay 50Gp.
The charging services and power bank business may be seen as some good emerging from the impact of Dumsor on the telecom industry. But that is woefully insignificant compared to the huge increases in the telcos cost of operations, and the battery and fuel thefts at cell sites as a result or Dumsor.
MTN Ghana’s Corporate Services Executive, Cynthia Lumor has for instance hinted that whereas they are taking every measure to shield their customers from the impact of Dumsor by way of passing on the cost to consumers in the form of tariffs, “if things continue the way they are we have to do what we have to do.” MTN commands a greater majority of mobile phone users in the country. So the negative impact of Dumsor on even MTN alone threatens a much wider consequence for a lot more Ghanaians than the few who are cashing in on Dumsor to provide power banks and phone charging services. Meanwhile, those who patronize those services also have their own electric bills waiting for them at home to pay.
It has therefore become imperative for government and its respective institutions to work assiduously towards solving the Dumsor because if the proposed 4Gp on-net minimum rate is approved, it will deny Ghanaians of the low tariffs and freebies they get from their service providers; and if the telcos would have to demand for further tariff increase because of unbearable Dumsor-related cost, then a time will come when the real benefits of the telecoms boom in Ghana would be completely lost on consumers.
The National Communications Authority (NCA) et al who were sued in relation to the Interconnect Clearinghouse (ICH), are filing their defense today pending first hearing on April 15, 2015, your authoritative Simcardblog has learned.
The others are all six telecom operators in the country and the selected ICH operator, Afriwave Telecoms Ghana Limited.
Reliable sources say counsel for NCA is Yoni Kolendi or Kolendi at Law; counsel for Afriwave is Ekow Daniels of Gyan Chambers and the telcos are allegedly being represented by Bentsi Enchill, Letsa and Ankomah Chambers.
The Member of Parliament (MP) for Obuasi West, Kwaku Kwarteng, together with Elijah Adansi-Bonah, the Research Director of Development Data (a policy research organization), sued the NCA, telcos and Afriwave early last month challenging the legality, constitutionality and necessity of the ICH.
The plaintiffs are praying the court to declare government’s move as “unlawful, unnecessary and an unconstitutional interference in the communication rights telecom subscribers in the country.”
The ICH is being set up as a private operator to connect international calls and interconnect calls between mobile networks in the country. It would also do real time monitoring of all domestic traffic on behalf of Ghana Revenue Authority.
Simcardblog is reliably informed that the fact that the ICH policy is a cabinet initiative and therefore has presidential assent would be a factor in court.
Currently, the telcos have mutual arrangements and systems for interconnecting calls but government is asking them to abandon that and connect calls through the ICH.
But the plaintiffs contend that while subscribers have standard agreements with the telcos to transmit their communication, they have no such agreement with any ICH operator.
They are therefore asking the court to order government not to proceed with the implementation of the ICH policy.
Meanwhile, Kwaku Kwarteng had argued on various platforms that the ICH idea is nothing but “dubious arrangement between government and its cronies in the private sector to benefit illegitimately from tax payers.”
Beside Kwaku Kwarteng and his colleague, several other organizations include the Wireless Applications Service Providers Association of Ghana (WASPAG), Ghana Internet Service Providers Association (GISPA), Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA), OccupyGhana and others have kicked against it.
Interestingly, even the telcos, who are respondents in this case actually support the plaintiffs’ position fully. The telcos themselves have raised objections to the ICH in their responses to ICH policy proposal published on the NCA’s website.
The NCA has spelt out several benefits of the ICH to the country, consumers, local app developers and even the telcos. The benefits would a major boost in local content in the telecom industry, revenue assurance for the state, cost cutting for telcos and its resultant affordable tariffs for consumers among other things.
They have also argued that the ICH would help stop the SIM box fraud menace as well.
But all that would be decided by the court beginning April 15, 2015.
Ghana’s ongoing power crisis, popularly known as “Dumsor”, has turned into a global ridicule, thanks to information and [tele]communication technology.
The term Dumsor has become so popular it has transcended the tangible world into the virtual. Not only has it made its way into world acclaimed free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, but it is also within the social media space as hashtag #Dumsor on Twitter and Facebook, and in the Google Play Store, manifesting in at least four applications.
Here is exactly what Wikipedia said about Dumsor: Dumsor or more appropriately Dum Sɔ is a popular Ghanaian term used to describe persistent electric power outages, which are being experienced during John Dramani Mahama’s presidency. The term is coined from two separate words from the Twi dialect of the Akan language (a language spoken widely in Ghana). Dum (to turn off or quench), and sɔ (to turn on or to make light).
The term was adopted because of the frequent blackouts due to insufficient power supply. Insufficient power supply refers to a load shedding exercise carried out daily by the Ghana Grid Company and Electricity Company of Ghana. The term started gaining prominence in 2009 when water levels of the Akosombo Dam dropped significantly which consequently led to a load shedding exercise due to the reduced generation capacity of the country’s main hydro-electric dam. The load shedding exercise has since continued and has plunged the country into major power crisis.
In terms of the usage of the term, this is what Wikipedia said: The word has been used by the general public in Ghana since 2009 in expressing anger, mockery, worry and disappointment in authorities of the ruling Government. It has also gained popularity via social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook with the hashtag #Dumsor. In 2015, John Mahama used the word in a state visit to Germany while talking with Angela Merkel, he indicated he has been nicknamed “Mr. Dumsor” due to the power crisis, where he attributed it to Nigeria for not supplying gas as required to Ghana through the West Africa Gas Pipeline.
Dumsor Apps
In the Google Play Store, there are four Dumsor apps; two of them provide information on the load shedding schedules (if there is any), while the two others trigger the torchlights on the mobile phone. The two Dumsor schedule apps are “Dumsor Dumsor” and “Dumsor Countdown”, and the torchlight triggers are “Dumsor” and “Dumsor Flashlight”. All four are downloadable for free from the Google Play Store, and in fact from other smaller App Stores.
Indeed, many Ghanaians today are able to make calls to radio stations and or post comments, pictures and videos on social media about their “dumsor experience” in real time, while it is yet happening.
All these information about the global status of Dumsor, the existence and downloadability of Dumsor Apps, and the opportunity to put dumsor information online and on air in real time are possible for people in virtually any corner of Ghana largely because of the wide spread of mobile telephony across the country. The five GSM operators, one CDMA operator and the up and coming 4G LTE operators in Ghana may not have necessarily covered every corner and reached every single citizen, but it is no secret that the number of active SIM cards in the country is, on paper, more than the number of people in the country.
President Mahama
President John Mahama enjoying telecoms service
In fact, President John Dramani Mahama recently repeated a comment by Keta MP Richard Quarshigah to the effect that the proliferation of mobile phones and multi-simming (one person using more than one mobile line) is part of the challenges government faces in trying to meet the power needs of Ghanaians. The president actually said there were 27 million active mobile phones in the country. But he got that wrong because he equated the number of active SIM cards, reported by the National Communications Authority (NCA) to the number of mobile phones being used in the country.
Indeed, the number of active SIMs is not the same as the number of mobile phones for two reasons: firstly, some of those SIMs are in devices such as modems and routers, which do not need electric charge to operate. Secondly, a lot of those SIMs may have been captured in the 90-day report of the NCA, but in reality some of them were inactive at the time the 90-day reporting period was due. People buy SIM cards and throw them away after one use. Some people may have also come into the country briefly for business, used a SIM for a few days or weeks and thrown them away and left. All those SIMs are captured in the NCA reports, so the president’s 27million active mobile phones comment was ill-informed.
But it does not take anything away from the fact that the telcos and their partners like handset manufacturers, Value Added Service (VAS) providers, equipment vendors and others within the telecom ecosystem, are driving the spread of knowledge and information across all social classes through affordable devices and packages, and tailor-made value offerings to meet the needs of all segments of the Ghanaian populace.
However, while Ghanaians continue to enjoy the benefits of information on Dumsor provided within the virtual space powered by mobile data infrastructure and innovation, the telcos and other players within the telecoms industry are not at all smiling about Dumsor, obviously because they are very much hard hit by it. Dumsor reached its worst in 2014. At the close of 2014, telcos reported making huge expenses they did not budget for, specifically because of Dumsor.
Telcos Market leader MTN Ghana reported spending a whopping GHS86 million plus on power and diesel in 2014. They noted that over GHS25 million of that money was expenses they did not budget for. In terms of the breakdown, MTN Ghana CEO, Serame Taukobong said they had budgeted a little over GHC35 million for electricity for the year, but spent over GHC51 million. And the budget for fuel was GHC25.6 million but they spent more than GHC35 million due to Dumsor. The CEO said they bought not less than two million liters of fuel in every month of year 2014.
Glo is reporting some additional 28% expenses on diesel to power generators in times of Dumsor. Head of Business for Glo Ghana Akeem Kazeem also said the company imported large consignments of generators to power their cell sites because even though electricity tariffs went up by 100% in 2014, power supply was cut by half so they had to depend heavily on generators.
Vodafone said they spent something in the region of GHS50 million plus on electricity and fuel in 2014. In fact a Vodafone official recently said at a forum to discuss security at cell sites that the company now depends on generator sets as their primary source of power because electricity supply from the national grid has rather become the back up by virtue of its erratic nature. That is how bad the situation has become.
Tigo said they have not been able to tease out power and fuel cost from their total operational cost but there is no doubt in their minds that in 2014, Dumsor shot operational cost up by a higher margin than usual. And their operational cost continues to soar as the Dumsor problem has not gotten any better this year,
Airtel also said the figures were not readily available but Dumsor is indeed hitting them hard like it is every other business in the country.
Fuel and battery theft
Meanwhile, it would appear the telcos suffered a triple blow because of Dumsor; the first two being the cost of power going up as supply remain erratic, and their spending on fuel going up as a result. The third blow was the numerous incidents of battery and fuel theft at their cell sites. Apparently, some unscrupulous Ghanaians found fuel and batteries at the telcos cell sites easy to steal for their personal use and or for sale to people who need shortcut and cheaper alternatives to Dumsor.
MTN reported a whopping 2,897 battery thefts in 2014. The highest number of thefts in one month was 562 in June, and the lowest was 14 in December. The other telcos have also had their own share of battery and fuel theft at their respective cell sites nationwide.
So, while the telcos are spending heavily to keep power supply to their infrastructure constant in order to sustain service to the public in the midst of Dumsor, some anti-social characters have also made it their business to shortchange phone users and give telcos the bad reputation that comes with Dumsor-related service interruptions.
As the Glo Ghana boss said, electricity tariffs went up by 100% in 2014 but power supply was halved. But telecom tariffs remained and still remains, relatively very low. In fact default telecom tariffs in Ghana is one of the lowest in the world and competition among eight players (including two LTE players) is even pushing prices further down in the form of bundles.
Meanwhile, telcos import almost every implement they use in providing services. They pay dollars for those implements. The Ghana cedi suffered the greatest fall to the dollar in 2014, so that also added to the cost burden on telcos. But because of competition they are unable to increase tariffs to levels that will make business sense. Some telcos have said their cost is now above their earnings, so some of them are seeking regulatory intervention in the form of a 4Gp fixed minimum on-net rate to help them compete and secure some revenue.
The National Communications Authority (NCA) has quietly changed the huge figures it quoted as Glo data and Expresso voice subscriptions.
It has also corrected the market share figures of all the telcos as a result of the alteration in the Glo and Expresso figures.
The correction shows that Glo never got an additional 1.44 million data customers in one month and Expresso never crossed the 200,000 voice subscriber base mark as was reported previously.
News of the two telcos making a dramatic turnaround in their subscriber base went viral after the NCA posted the Mobile Cellular Voice and Data Subscriber Base figures for January 2015 earlier this month.
The report showed that while Glo lost about 11,500 voice subscribers, it gained whopping 1.44 million data customers, from 668,424 in December 2014 to 2,091,600 in January 2015.
Glo has since acknowledged the authenticity of the figures and attributed the unprecedented increase to “network upgrade which increased our download speed to 42megabit/second nationwide.”
But the new figures, as reflected in the clandestine changes made by the NCA made on April 7, 2015, show that Glo never got such huge increase in data subs base. It actually lost some 15,753 data customer from 668,424 in December 2014 to 652,671 in January 2015. Its data market share therefore stood at 4.13%.
Meanwhile, in the previous erroneous report, the NCA said Glo’s data market share was 2.83%. Ironically, now that the actual figures have reduced, the NCA says Glo has 4.13% of the data market.
Again, the NCA had previously reported that Glo had 5.17% voice market share, but now that has also dropped to 4.7%, which indicates a dip from the previous month’s 4.78%.
With regards to the embattled Expresso, the NCA had reported that its voice subs increased by 155,491, from 119,059 to 274,550. But the corrected report shows just a marginal increase of 590 subs to 119,649.
The NCA had also reported that Expresso lost over 33,000 data customers from 37,331 to as low as 4,601 data customers. But that has also been altered to 35,252, which means Expresso lost only 2,079 data subs within the one month period.
Expresso therefore finished the period with 0.22% data market share and not 0.41%. It also had less than one per cent voice market share.
But it would appear that the anomalies in what the NCA posted previously were not limited to the striking bogus figures for Glo and Expresso.
Overall
Even the overall all figures were wrong and have now been corrected. Previously the NCA reported that overall mobile cellular subscriptions for January 2015 was over 30.78 million, but now it has reduced to 30.63 million; and it represents 115.15% penetration and not 108.48% as previously reported.
Overall data subscriptions have also been altered from over 17.2 million to 15.8 million, which actually represents a decrease from the December 2014 figure.
Interestingly, the reduced total data subscription figure rather represented more than 51.5% of the total mobile subscriptions in the country, unlike the erroneous 17.2million which was rather pegged at 49.1%.
Other telcos
But the corrected report maintained that market leader MTN, lost 258,596 data subs over the period under review, which is almost 50% market share.
Vodafone’s 7.18 million voice subs base was also maintained but the voice market share increased from 23.29% to 23.43%. Meanwhile, the erroneous report had stated that Vodafone’s market share dropped to 21.97%.
On the data front, the corrected figures show the previous figures for Vodafone were correct but the data market share is not 15.1% but rather 18.68%.
Both the voice and data subs figures for Tigo were also maintained in the corrected report. But its voice market share changed from 14.28% to 13.72% and the data market share also went up from 12.25% to 14.32%.
Finally, Airtel’s voice and data figures were also maintained, but voice market share changed from 12.35% to 12.25%, while the data market share also dropped from 15.83% to 13.64%.
Industry watchers
Industry watchers who noticed the anomalies before they were secretly altered on the NCA’s website think “someone is sleeping on the job at NCA.”
They also noted that Glo, for instance, was very much aware their data customers did not increase by 1.44million and yet they went with the media hype and assigned reasons for the previously reported fake figure.
Glo had actually admitted earlier on that their data subs represented only 17% of their total customer base and in ratio terms data to voice subs was 1:5. So pundits wondered why Glo would bask in the glory of the erroneous figures.
“That was very disingenuous of Glo,” one industry watcher said. .
Meanwhile other experts insisted there was no way a telco could be losing voice subs and be recording such huge increase in data subs since the uptake of data subscriptions is mainly driven by increase in smartphones usage across networks.
“It is shocking that the regulator would make such significant changes to a report on its website without any explanation, after its grave errors had been published widely in the media,” one expert said.
Your authoritative Simcardblog has since sent a questionnaire to NCA asking what led to the grave erroneous figures published previously but the NCA has not provided any explanations.
Reliable but very scanty information reaching your authoritative Simcardblog indicates the implementation of Ghana’s proposed interconnect clearinghouse policy could delay as government and key industry players in the country jaw-jaw over the policy.
The Minister of Communication, Chairman of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Communication, and member of the National Communications Authority held a highly-tensed meeting with industry players Wednesday and high on the agenda was the ICH policy, which is currently generating a lot of interest and some amount of acrimony in the industry.
The high-level consultative meeting, which was said to have been characterized by some amount of calm tension and entrenched positions on the ICH policy lasted for five hours, between the house 9am and 2pm.
Present at the meeting were the heads of the six telcos, representatives of the Ghana Internet Service Providers Association (GISPA), and the Wireless Applications Service Providers Association of Ghana (WASPAG).
Attendees of the meeting are pretty much tight-lipped about exactly what transpired, but it is no secret the heated public argument between the regulator, telecom operators, pressure groups and even some individual lawmakers about the ICH policy.
Parliament, at some point, called for further and deeper consultation before implementation, but that was misrepresented as Parliament calling for a suspension of the policy.
The policy implementation is expected to take off latest by June this year, but MP for Obuasi West, Kwaku. Kwarteng, together with Mr Elijah Adansi-Bonah, Research Director of Development Data (a policy research organisation), have sued the NCA, telcos and the selected ICH operator, Afriwave Telecoms Ghana, questioning the legality of the ICH.
Prior to that legal suit, Kwarteng had been in the media describing the ICH as an unwarranted venture, a product of cronyism and an avenue intended by the NCA to siphon undeserving funds and share with its cronies.
Indeed, telcos themselves responded to a public consultation document on the NCA’s website questioning the necessity of the ICH given the existing functional interconnect arrangements between the telcos, and raising issues of extra cost to telcos and impact on quality of service among other things.
Pressure groups like IMANI Ghana, OccupyGhana and Media Foundation for West Africa have also been out there raising questions about how safe customers’ privacy is under the ICH policy and whether ICH will not harm quality of service to the customer and push tariffs up.
Some also questioned how the ICH would help fight SIMBOX fraud as has been touted by the proponents of the policy.
Indeed, all these questions have received some answers, and much more information have been put out about the benefits of the ICH to telcos, their customers, local value added service providers and the country as a whole. But that has still not taken the acrimony and arguments away.
The NCA has for instance said it will pay fully for the setting up and operations of the ICH so there will be no cost to the telcos and the customers. It has said telcos would not need upgrades and or downgrades of equipment because ICH will meet every telco at the point of their need.
On the issue of quality of service, the NCA has said the same QoS standards and sanctions applied to telcos would be applied to the ICH; and on the issue of eavesdropping the NCA said ICH is also barred by law, just like the telcos are, from tapping into people’s communication.
Meanwhile, some individual telecom experts have also said that ICH will boost local content, which is actually one of the main reasons for the policy. It will help other players in the ecosystem to connect to all players at a single point and save cost, instead of going to all players as individuals.
They insist that the ICH arrangement will even help telcos save money because maintenance of six interconnect equipment will now reduce to one and they will cut down cost, plus they will also be able to clear international roaming traffic locally and pay less, so that they prevent capital flight and also offer cheaper roaming tariffs.
The ICH would also have an extra job of international and domestic traffic monitoring for state revenue assurance on behalf of both the NCA and the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA).
Meanwhile, the critics of the ICH are now questioning why a private entity was selected to run the ICH without the involvement of telcos and yet telcos are being compelled by law to connect to the equipment of that private entity.
There have also been suggestions as to why NCA could not collaborate with telcos to establish an ICH that all parties would feel confident and comfortable about rather than giving the license to a third party.
All these issues form part of an ongoing public debate. But Adom News is reliably informed that when all is said and done, the ICH will take off before the close of the year because it is already gearing up towards implementation.
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