Telecoms expansion should tally with service quality

The country’s tele communications revolution has been been a great asset. Telecoms have eased communication; money transfer and the cost of doing business in the country.

 They have also enabled free flow of information through various innovations.

But while they scramble to compete for the market, some of their service qualities are wanting. Instead of focusing on expansion, telecoms should concentrate on service improvement, ending dropped calls and sorting out the SMS sending and receiving failures.

Telecoms have been continuously offering poor services as they switch focus to growing subscriber numbers with no investment to support the growth.

In some areas, it becomes impossible to complete calls, while others are jammed by interference or network failure.

In some instances, short text messages take more than seven hours to be delivered. In some cases, message delivery fails while the sender is still charged. This should be reduced to a bare minimum if not eliminated.

Some Telecoms send to clients’ unsolicited text messages, sometimes more than ten SMSs per day. This is quite disturbing.

The money transfer services also face various interruptions, with the systems sometimes break down.

The Cellular Mobile Quality of Service Performance Assessment Report for all the mobile phone operators in the country prepared by the sector regulator, the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) says found a lot of things wanting.

Network uptake

CCK requires that of the eight quality of service parameters an operator is expected to meet or exceed the threshold of at least seven of those. For the period 2010-2011, no mobile operator in the country met the quality of service target set by the operator at 80 per cent.

Safaricom, Airtel and Essar Ltd all scored 75 per cent with Telkom Kenya scoring 50 per cent.

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