Ghana’s mirage of a thriving mobile industry
As I write this post, I’m seething with anger. For weeks I have had to endure horrible voice and data services from my mobile provider.
What’s more frustrating is that porting to another network isn’t a useful option. All I’m guaranteed is the same frustration and crappy service for which I’m currently disgruntled.
For years, we’ve continued to trumpet growing mobile penetration with little measure of the quality of mobile telephony. With penetration now at about 98%, access is really not an issue anymore. We want value for every Pesewa of our money spent on mobile communication. The challenges with mobile telephony are varied and longstanding. I’ll elaborate on some of them below:
Voice
Subscribers to voice services are inundated with an ever-growing list of call plans, mostly requiring you to subscribe by calling or messaging a specific shortcode. Often, lower tariffs are promised at a given time of day or at random (called zones) or a low on-network call rate. What unsuspecting subscribers are deliberately kept in the dark about is that these tariffs also mean higher call rates either at different times of the day or on outbound calls to other networks. With each network offering a wide varieties of call plans, often questionably labelled as ‘promotions’. There’s little differentiation. And frankly, subscribers are mostly using the default call plan. Can’t any network decide to differentiate with clear, simple and common sense plans that everyone knows and understands?
Data
The reliability of data services on mobile networks in Ghana is zero (maybe slightly better). Contrary to the massive advertising bearing admittedly well-crafted messages about fast and reliable internet with a wide coverage, speak to anyone and you’re bound to hear a litany of complaints from snail-pace connections (even when your device says you have 3G signal) to a total absence of data connection spanning days. In the case of the latter situation, if you’re subscribed to a data bundle, you don’t get your validity extended on account of the days when the data network simply didn’t work. I concede that networks will always have challenges, but what prevents a telecoms company from sending text messages to all affected subscribers who suffer a downtime on voice or data services? Again, is it not only ethical to extend expiry date for people who are unable to use their data bundles during these periods of downtime?
Value Added Services (VAS)
Our mobile networks have been totally unimpressive here too! One can fairly say that mobile VAS in Ghana is almost exclusively premium SMS services. Our telecoms companies have failed abysmally to embrace the data revolution and roll out services that would not only reduce their reliance of voice for revenue, but would make them competitive through product and service differentiation and less susceptible to price wars. The lack of innovation goes as far as to simply copying not just the service of a competitor (it’s not even clear if they are truly competing) but also the name of the service. And oh, why am I surprised? After all, one telecoms company has the inscription “We Copy With Pride” as part of its corporate values on giant boards at its head office. Assuming these telecoms companies are lost for ideas on value added services to roll out, what prevents them from collaborating — in a mutually beneficial manner — with Ghana’s budding developer community? I am aware of many useful apps that have been developed and not attracted the needed interest and/or support from our telecoms companies to make them viable. Leaves you wondering if there’s any real interest in exploring fully, the possibilities that mobile telephony affords.
The Regulator
Perhaps, this is where I feel the deepest sense of disappointment. Often, I’m left wondering if the officials at the National Communications Authority (NCA) experience the same poor services the rest of us are perpetually confronted with. Are there minimum service quality standards that are being enforced? How often are telecoms companies cited and sanctioned as necessary for failing to meet these standards? On the few occasions when fines have been announced, were these fines paid? Again, is there a mechanism to check operator fraud, especially with many subscribers complaining, from time to time, that they feel they have been wrongly billed? Why isn’t my provider mandated to provide me with an itemised bill upon request, even if at a cost?
Mobile subscribers can only hope for a jolt in the industry, driven by one operator opting to depart from the limited innovation and poor customer service that currently plagues the industry. I certainly look forward to a regulator that takes its responsibility more seriously and enforces service delivery standards. Until then, I’ll be happy to actively support public interest lawsuits targeted at mobile operators. Nothing will change if all we do is sit down and fume on Facebook and our blogs like I’m doing. Where my lawyer friends at?
By Samuel Owusu Darko
Email: [email protected]
Good points, but the main responsibility for the poor services lays with Ghanaians. Telcos outlay $millions to run fibre optics cables around the country and we go and cut them. It costs about $25,000 to repair a cut. Also, our primitive electricity supply affects the telcos’ service delivery. The construction companies and others who cut the cables PLUS our laughable electricity suppliers are the main culprits. We are getting the service levels we deserve!
Brome, I disagree about who should be responsible. Ghanaians should certainly not be cutting cables but that CANNOT be basis for giving poor service! These telcos come into Ghana and other parts of Africa, fully aware of all the risks and then they begin to complain about situations that exist in our markets. Why don’t they also complain about the rather loose regulatory framework in which they are allowed to operate? Or about the very high profit margins they make? Or about a community that allows deceptive and sometimes fraudulent marketing and ‘promotions’. When we focus on cables, Are the telcos accounting for the damage they are doing to sidewalks and asphalt? They lay their cables and do little to restore the roads and streets to the state in which they were; or better!
As an American who attempts to conduct online chats with my fiance in Ghana (Kumasi) daily, we get frustrated at the poor connectivity and often very slow connectivity of her service there. Sometimes we are unable to chat for 2-3 days at a time. Other times when we are chatting, the connection is so slow there that we wait 4-5 minutes for a response both ways. This is the 21st Century, and this level of 20th Century services in inexcusable.