Rwanda’s telecoms regulator said it would fine the country’s unit of South African telecommunications group MTN for the second time in four years for poor quality service.
MTN Rwanda is the by far the country’s largest mobile phone operator with about two thirds of its subscribers.
The regulator on Thursday 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, the regulator said.
MTN said independent technical teams had carried out another survey of its Rwandan networks the following month and found no major problems. The September survey found that “despite hitches that sometimes might be beyond our control like fibre cuts, our network is operating within Key Performance Indicators in our license obligations,” MTN said.
MTN will be fined 3,000,000 Rwandan francs ($4,788) for each day in which they do not comply with the notice, for a maximum of one month, the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (Rura) said in a statement.
It warned of further unspecified actions should MTN fail to improve its services. Johannesburg-based MTN, which owns 80 percent of the Rwandan operation, said it has been trying to improve its services since receiving an initial warning by the regulator in March this year.
In 2009, the regulator fined MTN Rwanda $140,000, saying it had failed to roll out network upgrades or address problems such as dropped calls.
The telecoms regulator also issued a warning, but no fine, for poor service to MTN’s rival Tigo Rwanda owned by Millicom International Cellular, giving it one month to improve some of its services found in a survey to be wanting.
Rura figures showed MTN had about 3.1 million out of the country’s 4.9 million subscribers in July.
—Reuters
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