Safaricom, Airtel and Telkom Kenya Pay heavy Fines for Poor Service

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The communications authority has revealed that mobile service providers in the country paid a total of KES 190 million in fines for the poor quality of services in 2015. Market leaders, Safaricom, had to part with KES 157 million of the total amount while Telkom Kenya and Airtel had to pay the remainder, a combined total of KES 33 million. The mobile services providers were unable to meet all the quality standards set by the regulator for three consecutive years, which left the communications authority with no choice but raise the fines for the poor quality of services.

The new rules impose a hefty fine of 0.1 per cent of gross annual turnover on the telecom operators. Formerly, failure to meet the quality of standards threshold (QoS) meant that each mobile service provider had to pay a fine of KES 0.5M flat. The market leader Safaricom objected to the regulator’s methods of assessing poor quality services and to the criteria in which the communications authority came up with the fines during the company’s annual Sustainability Report released on Tuesday. “It should be noted that we, along with other Kenyan mobile network operators, have expressed concerns regarding the QoS measures used by the CA,” said the company.

 Safaricom had met the 80 percent quality benchmark on most of the indicators used by the communications authority except three: blocked calls, call set up rate and completed calls. The communications authority uses 8 key indicators that focus on the voice side of the business to set quality standards for mobile service providers. “We continue to work with CA but sometimes we don’t agree with them,” said Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore. In the last few years, Safaricom has been working with consultant firm P3 Communications to independently assess the quality of their call services in the country. Finding from P3’s communication survey on the subject says that Safaricom has the best services in all but one indicator, dropped calls.

New Standards

 In response to changes in the telecommunications industry and to pressure from stakeholders, the new standards will see the communications authority increase Communication’s Authority is at the moment carrying out a review of the basis within which it undertakes quality of service surveys. Talks on new draft regulations concerning the matter were concluded in September. The new regulations will see the communication authority increase the scope of its survey while assessing the quality of standards to include SMS and data services. These new regulations will also include customer participation in the surveys. In the new system, irregularities between the figures internally generated by the firms on their network performance and CA’s provided data will be addressed by monthly reports from the mobile service providers. In a statement issued by the communications authority, the regulator said that review of the Quality of Service threshold was necessitated by rapid advancements in technology and mobile services witnessed in the market in recent times. Data from the telecommunication industry in the quarter to June 2016 showed an 85.3% internet penetration in the country, and a 100% increase in the number of SMSs sent in the same period. The new framework will incorporate internet service providers such as Liquid Telecom and Access Kenya in the quality of service surveys, both of which have been left out in previous studies.

Punitive Regulations

 The country is following the path of other nations in the region with its punitive regulations towards telecom operators, and MTN Nigeria has agreed to pay 1.7 billion in US dollars as a penalty for being unable to abide by to industry regulations on SIM card registrations in Nigeria, in the most recent case in the region. Earlier in 2012, MTN also faced a $7.4 million fine in Nigeria for poor quality of services. Rwandatel’s telecom licence was withdrawn for telecom poor service in Rwanda four years ago. The communications authority proposed measures are aimed at improving the quality of services in the country and if everything goes according to the plan, these measures will be piloted next year.

Safaricom Guarantee Service

 Safaricom in an attempt to address the dropped calls issue raised by its independent quality of services assessing firm P3 Communications have introduced the Safaricom Guarantee programme earlier this year. The service is intended to pay subscribers for dropped calls. Customers will receive refunds for dropped calls within the safaricom’s network for up to one minute of talk time.

Falling Satisfaction

 Safaricom’s business clients show signs of falling satisfaction with services with specific concerns over the quality of fixed data, while an internal assessment by the company indicated an overall improvement in client satisfaction with voice calls and data services. The Communication Authority reported a 9 percent decline in customer satisfaction in the fixed data segment of the market. Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore blamed the drop in customer satisfaction on client discontent on the fixed data space.

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