Just days after Zimbabwe’s ICT Minister Nelson Chamisa declared he would crack the whip on Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) in the country for poor service delivery, POTRAZ, the telecoms regulatory body, has revealed that it’s currently unable to measure the networks’ quality of service (QoS). The revelations were made this week in an article published in Zimbabwe’s state owned daily The Herald.
POTRAZ deputy director-general Alfred Marisa said that the regulator had last year engaged a consulting firm to carry out QoS measurements whose results they intended to use to enforce come standards but they had since established that this would be an “unviable” option. It’s not clear at which stage of the engagement with the consultant this realization was made.
The regulator, Marisa said, has opted for doing the QoS measurements themselves and they are in the process of procuring QoS measurement equipment. Measurement of the quality of service, and therefore enforcement will only be possible after the regulator is equipped with the results of QoS measurement.
How long the procurement will take is anyone’s guess but this certainly means subscribers are likely not to see the issues of poor quality service solved immediately.
In related news on the continent last week, the Rwandan telecoms regulator fined MTN for the second time in four years for poor quality service. The Rwandan regulator said it had carried out a survey in August showing MTN had failed to meet minimum thresholds on call completion rate, speech quality, signal strength and other measures. MTN was fined 3 million Rwandan francs (about USD 5,000) for each day in which they do not comply with the notice, for a maximum of one month.
Zimbabwe has 3 operational GSM MNOs; Econet, NetOn and Telecel. The three companies have expanded rapidly is the past 4 years taking the mobile penetration from just 24% in 2009 to the current 90%.
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