A new survey indicates that Ugandans are yet to get the best from their mobile phone service providers even as the country continues to see some technological revolutions.
This, the Uganda Communications Commission says, has not been achieved even as a number of improved mobile phone handsets enter the country.
The annual survey – Quality of Service published last week is based on the five operational structures of the Global System for Mobile communications networks and that most service providers continue to fall short of the set service quality limits for both dropped and blocked calls.
UCC set 2 per cent as the maximum limit for blocked and dropped calls, respectively, which it uses to gauge the quality of service by telecommunications companies including Airtel, MTN, Warid, Orange and Uganda Telecom.
Although most telecoms seem to have reduced the incidences of dropped calls – those that are terminated by the network before they are ended –, its only Orange that is within the limits for blocked calls – one considered as an unsuccessful call attempt due to network failure.
The survey was conducted between May – July 2013 covering eight towns of Gulu, Jinja, Kampala, Lira, Masaka, Mbale, Mbarara and Mukono.
The report further indicates that although service quality is still wanting, Orange and Warid are ranked as the best among the surveyed five after registering the highest number of incidences of compliance as per UCC requirements.
MTN was ranked the least compliant among the five players, followed by Utl. UCC advised network operators to enhance their redundancy measures, through provision of back-up transmission routes to provide reliable network quality.
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Telecoms say they usually experience outages that impact network availability and quality due to power and transmission and fibre cut related challenges.
UCC, however, urged telecoms to prioritise the protection of their physical transmission infrastructure such as fibre cables and network sites, adding that the commission will not tolerate any quality of service deterioration as a result of inadequate protection of fibre cables and other infrastructure from physical damage.
UCC further cautioned telecom operators with low or limited available network resources to desist from carrying out promotions that have a direct impact on network resources.
The Daily Monitor could, however, not get comments from service providers as questions directed to them had not been responded to by press time.
Credit: Daily Monitor
