MTN, Celtel to refund N4.7bn to subscribers over poor services

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) has directed mobile cellular networks MTN and Celtel to pay N175 to each of their 27 million subscribers for failing to meet the regulatory body’s specified quality of service standard in the month of January this year.

This is even as telecom operators in the country continue to complain of poor network backbone and other infrastructure, multiple taxation andvandalism of their equipment among other hinderances.

MTN had 15,873,000 subscribers as at the end of December 2007, while Celtel had 11,098,500 subscribers in the same period.
Measuring by the December 2007 subscriber figures, MTN will pay back to its subscribers more than N2.77-billion while Celtel will pay over N1.94-billion under the NCC’s directive. The total sum comes to over N4.7-billion.

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The monies are to be paid back to subscribers in the form of airtime credit refunds. Our sources said both operators had failed to meet the key performance indicator average for quality of service on the national average. The NCC had earlier said that network congestion, exceeding the 10 percent mark would bring about a N175 per month sanction, per subscriber.

Ernest Ndukwe, the Executive Vice Cairman of the NCC had said in a television interview weeks back:”We are very insistent about this issue of compensation, we have said that we will monitor their services and that at the end of January, we will look at those operators that have not met the minimum congestion level and once we establish that, then we will impose sanctions”
He added that the NCC would not accept a situation in which the networks charged subscribers for services not rendered.

Ndukwe however said that he appreciated that “the operators are all working hard to ensure that the capacity issue is addressed, but what we have done despite all the issues that have been going on, we have actually gone ahead to ensure that we demand performance from the operators and that those who have not been able to meet the minimum performance indicators that we published will be made to pay compensation to subscribers”.

Elaborating on the issue of quality of service, he said that the operators had been facing challenges but insisted that the main issue in Nigeria today was capacity constraint.

”What has happened is that when people move from one part of the country to another, you have a kind of congestion on the network. What we have done is to ensure that those operators continue to build capacity as fast as possible, in order to make sure that the capacity issue is addressed”, he added.

Some operators had challenged the NCC’s decision to impose such sanctions before the Federal High Court but the case was thrown out.