TMCnet News
Telecoms Sector Regulation - How Has NCC Fared?(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) NIGERIA'S telecoms industry regulator in the last four years has undertaken a number of policy initiatives under the leadership of the Executive Vice Chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Eugene Juwah, all of which, according to some quarters in the industry has continue to put the nation's telecoms market on the path of growth, with experts saying much still need to be done to take the industry to its 'promised land.' With the expiration of his tenure as the chief regulator of the industry for eight years, Dr. Ernest Ndukwe left the leadership mantle for another Executive Vice Chairman of the NCC, Dr, Eugene Juwah, another telecoms engineer to pilot the affairs of the industry sustainably to the path of consistent growth. Indeed, on July 29, 2014, the appointment of Juwah clocked exactly four years and during this period, the industry could said to have witnessed a lot of policy initiatives, which have continued to impact positively on the industry with multiplier effect being felt on other sectors of the economy. But not to the admiration of all, because some quarters believed the regulator could do better. Following Juwah's confirmation by the Senate as the 4th EVC of the NCC, he marshaled a six-point agenda for his tenure, which, he promised as at then, to pursue to its fruition at an event held at Sheraton Hotels and Towers in Ikeja, Lagos to unveil his agenda to journalists. The six-point agenda, as chronicled by him, included consolidating the progress made before he came to office; taking drastic measures to improve quality of service (QoS); enhancing broadband implementation; improving competition among telecoms players; providing diversified choices for consumers at good quality and price; as well as improving the telecoms regulator's presence in the international space. Since then, the Juwah-led NCC team has been implementing various policies and putting in place measures towards ensuring it accomplished the agenda. On consolidation of the progress made so far, stakeholders are of the view that the regulator has achieved significant progress in this area, which is obviously expected. Growth in subscriber base and teledensity According to one of the industry analysts and telecoms engineer, Akin Akinbo, "If we start from the parameters which NCC put in place, the industry has increased teledensity from 63 per cent in 2010 when Juwah came in to more than 90 per cent in 2014." He said, "We've also increased subscriber base from 88 million in 2010 to more than 130 million currently as released by the regulator in its monthly subscriber data. This is an improvement of almost 50 per cent in four years that Juwah came to office." It was learnt that the 88 million subscriber mark was recorded over a period of 10 years after liberalisation of the sector. "In the area of subscriber growth and all the things NCC is doing to encourage this, I think the regulator has done well and it is as a result of increased favourable regulatory regime put in place by the NCC without which all the good things we've seen today would not have been possible," said Chief Executive Officer, Etisalat, Matthew Willsher, during an interactive session with journalists in Lagos recently. He particularly urged the NCC to continue with its implementation of policies that will further put the industry on the path of development to attain its prime place in the global telecoms map. Consequently, the increased telephony penetration recorded in the last four years has also contributed remarkably to the Nigerian economy in terms of contribution to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Telecoms sector increased contribution to GDP and FDI "We've increased it from five per cent when I came in to 8.5 per cent as announced recently during the rebasing of the economy. Finally, looking at investment in the sector, we increased it from $18 billion in 2010 to more than $32 billion today. The sector has created the most stable jobs and as investments grew in the past four years, more jobs, both direct and indirect, had been created and are still being created," Juwah stated in a recent interview. From the quality of service standpoint, stakeholders say the regulator could have done better, but it has always been striving to do better judging from the various sanctions it has imposed on the operators all aimed at ensuring that they meet the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), for Quality of Service set for them by the regulator. Closely linked to this, the Juwah-led NCC also undertook review of the old interconnect rates, following the expiration of the old interconnect rate regime last year. Also referred to as termination rates, interconnection rates are the charges, which one telecoms operator charges another for terminating calls on its network and one of the key premises for open and faircompetition in a telecoms market is an effective interconnection regime. The NCC decided to adopt the asymmetric rates for the new inter connect regime in recognition of late entrants and the commencement of the Unified Service Licensing Regime to create an enabling environment for healthy competition in the telecoms market. MNP initiative; SMS cap; Interconnect rate among others. Another initiative put in place by the NCC is the setting of price cap on local SMS at N4.00 with effect from February 5, 2013. The new price cap is a 60 per cent reduction from the former price that was N10 per SMS for off-net and N5 per SMS for on-net text messages and this has continued to earn NCC adulation from subscribers. "We've reduced pricessignificantly. In fact if you look at voice services, we've reduced price at more than 45 per cent in four years; we've slashed the prices of SMS from N10 to N4. We've actually provided good choice for consumers at reasonably good price," Juwah said. In the last four years, the NCC has also gone ahead to pay attention to the dominant nature of some players in the industry and declared them dominant players with some limitations put in place so as to ensure that their dominance in the industry would not jeopardize healthy competition in the sector. Speaking on this decision, Juwah said: "We have also improved competition by looking at the competition space within the telecoms industry, looking at operators that are dominant; imposing some limitations on them. Explaining further on this, the NCC boss explained that: "I must say, like I've always said that dominance is nothing bad but what you do with your dominance matters. Dominance means that you've been doing everything correct, you've been doing things well that's why you're dominating, but if you use your dominance in uncompetitive practice that's when the regulator intervenes." The Mobile Number Portability, (MNP) or porting service launched in April 2013, was another initiative that allows telecoms subscribers the freedom to move their telephone number(s) to any network they has allowed for wider choices among telecoms subscribers. At the launch, many stakeholders, including the operators, other regulators and the subscribers described the service as game changer that will not only provide wider choices for the subscribers but also afford them the opportunity to get improved service delivery as operators scramble to invest more on their network to retaining their existingsubscribers as well as making their network attractive to potential telephone users. According to the NCC boss, "We've also rolled out Mobile Number Portability (MNP) to deepen competition: if you don't like your operator, you move to the next one; holding your number. We've provided diversified choice for consumers. There're many products being rolled out which we're approving." The NCC has also continued to drive broadband penetration in the country as part of the six-point agenda it proposed to implement and this is one area where NCC has been very active. Already, the regulator is encouraging investment into the country; licensing more spectrum to the operators to drive broadband and partnering with various stakeholders to ensure that all the challenges facing deployment are obliterated. Further assessing NCC on this, Juwah said: "Rightfrom the time I came into the communications industry, I saw that the trend is changing from voice to data and data in the good form must be broadband. That's why you have good Internet, good video service and a plethora of services coming out of broadband. "Apart from that, broadband is a development product, a product that is capable of increasing the GDP of Nigeria, it is also capable of taking Nigeria into the knowledge-based economy that the world is pursuing, it is a product that is capable of increasing the efficiency of our younger generation; this is how we see broadband, and we see that its something that we have to do for Nigeria to enter the 21st century properly, and if we don't do it then we've failed. We've taken the issue of increasing broadband penetration as a priority. "To start off that programme is not easy; you first of all have to convince the in-house people and the government that this is important and they have to support you. You have to tell the international audience what you want to do so that they'll get interested because you depend on them to bring in investment. "It took some time for this ground work to be done, but we've started with a publication of our bid for the licensing of Infrastructure Companies (InfraCos), which is actually the major foundation of our broadband intervention. I can tell you that the response is quite interesting; response from inside and outside the country." The NCC boss disclosed that the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has endorsed the InfraCos initiative and it is supporting NCC and even helping the country to source for international investors. In February, this year, NCC licensed the 30MHz of spectrum in the 2.3 gigahertz spectrum to a wholesale company. Also the NCC has announced its plan to license 2.6 gigahertz spectrum to operators on which a stakeholder forum is planned to be held in Lagos to discuss the way forward on how to license the new spectrum. Among other initiatives, which the NCC has put in place is also the unveiling of a corporate governance code for the telecoms players in Lagos recently. With the unveiling of the industry-specific code of corporate governance, the NCC said it intends to enthroneglobal best practices among the boards of telecoms players, whose actions and inactions have far-reaching effects on the entire telecoms industry. "The code became necessary to reposition the sector to contribute more to the country's rebased GDP," said Juwah at the launch of the code in Lagos. Juwah said the corporate governance principles of accountability, responsibility, transparency,integrity and ethical conduct, independence among others are important for all types of companies operating in the telecommunications industry whether public or private, large or small. "The requirement for good corporate governance does not wane on account of size or type of business affiliations," Juwah said. "Shareholders and other stakeholders are now placinghigher demand on companies to demonstrate these principles. Thus, NCC is determined to promote corporate governance for the telecommunications industry." According to Juwah, "the telecommunications sector is of strategic and high impact significance to the economy at a macro level and has considerable reach at the micro level. He said this is made up of a wide range of operators with diversity in size, scope of operations, asymmetry qualifications, legal and regulatory requirements, capital market activities as well as local and cross-border relationships." Stakeholders want more from NCC, score commission low on QoS Meanwhile, while the likes of the Association of Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ATCON); Association of Licensed Telephone Operators of Nigeria (ALTON); as well as the Nigeria Internet Group (NIG) has commended the NCC's regulation in the last four years; they still maintain that it is not yet uhuru for the sector, as more still needs to be done. For instance, ATCON President, Lanre Ajayi, said, "Indeed, NCC has done very well but muchstill need to b done in terms of continuing to make the market investor friendly both for existing and new players." ALTON President, Gbenga Adebayo, who had accussed the commission of being populist in its actions, especially on the operators, particularly urged the NCC to remove all obstacles confronting the operators' infrastructure rollout plans, hoping that with the ongoing regulation, stakeholders can only expect better outlook in the years to come. An Abuja based Lagos telecoms expert, Kehinde Aluko, like Adebayo strongly believe, the Juwah led NCC have all resources to do better, stressing that one major things consumers want is improved telecoms services. "Not that NCC has not performed in the last four years but with the amount of resources and power at its disposal, the country's telecoms sector should be among the world best 10." However, the President, National Association of Telecoms Subscribers, Deolu Ogunbanjo, who commended NCC for its effort as ensuring that telecoms operators provide good services with wider choices provided through MNP services, stressed that "Our own is that the service quality is not yet satisfactory and we would want NCC to beam its actions into this until we begin to have superior services comparable to what obtains in the most developed countries around the world." Meanwhile, the NCC continues to make itself prominent in international arena by participating at both regional and global telecoms events, a momentum the regulator says it will continue to drive. "As for our presence in the international arena we're taking part in all the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) conferences, in fact the whole world knows us because we organise what we call Leaders Lunch in every ITU World Telecom event where all the big shots in telecoms come and listen to us. "Also, remember that in the recent ones we had, people like Carlos Slim, one of the richest men in the world and a huge investor in telecoms came and we had the opportunity of explaining what we're doing in Nigeria to him. We've achieved a lot in our six-point agenda," Juwah said. Copyright The Guardian. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |