The Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), a non-governmental organisation that mediates between consumer and producers, has called on the Ministry of Communication and Digitalisation to sanction telecos providing poor services in the country.
According to CPA, with the new technologies available to telecos, their services should have improved by now, rather, the situation was getting worse without the industry taking steps to address the numerous complaints from consumers.
The Chief Executive Officer of CPA, Mr Kofi Kapito, stated these when he addressed the press yesterday in Accra.
He enumerated some of the challenges consumers faced on daily basis as unsolicited promotions, adverts and poor network, which the telecos had failed to address.
He added that, the National Communication Authority (NCA), the agency mandated to ensure consumers were protected by providing safeguard mechanisms for seeking redress on communication issues, had also not conducted their Quality of Service Parameter (QSP) for a while.
Mr Kapito explained that, the NCA used to conduct the QSP on speech quality or mean opinion score, Call setup time (CST), Call Congestion Rate (CCR), Call Drop and Stand Alone Dedicated Control Channel (SDCCH) and Congestion Rate, as a means of measuring performances of the various telecos.
“The speech quality is the measurement of voice quality that has been used in telephony for decades as a way of assessing the human user’s opinion of call quality. The test is widely to ensure quality voice transmission, test for quality issues and measures voice degradation and performance.
“CST is the length of time it takes from initiating a call to the time the call is delivered or the fraction of the attempts end with a connection to the dialed number,” Mr Kapito explained.
He said without this important QOS, it would be difficult to assess the performances of the telecos and issue sanctions to those who had violated the regulations that guided them.
“The CPA is also aware that, some telecos in the industry are not being able to use or max-up the spectrum assigned to them while other telecos have maxed-up their spectrum and need more spectrum for them to provide quality service to consumers. We are therefore asking the minister to take a look at how to make it possible for the telecos that need more spectrum to be provided.”
“There’s been an instance where a mother lost a daughter because of unsolicited promotions and adverts. She didn’t want to be bothered by these unsolicited messages at night, and unfortunately it was her daughter who sent a text message in an emergency,” Mr Kapito said.
BY BERNARD BENGHAN
