Quality of ICT service – are you getting a raw deal?
What you need to know:
- In the ancient days when ICTs were synonymous with a telephone line, it was very easy for the regulator to measure the quality of service for voice services.
- But service providers have been able to improve their profit margins by delaying or deliberately avoiding increasing their network capacities.
- This complexity of regulating modern ICT services creates a grey area that leaves the consumers at the mercy of service providers.
- Regulators must urgently reboot their regulatory toolbox in order to meet these challenges.
The quality of service in the ICT sector has always been a challenge for both the regulator and the consumers, leaving the providers to exploit the gaps with impunity.
In the ancient days when ICTs were synonymous with a telephone line, it was very easy for the regulator to measure the quality of service for voice services.
In its simplest approach, the regulator would expect that if a subscriber made ten calls, nine of them would go through successfully and all of them should be sustained for at least three minutes without being dropped.
This is a layman’s way of describing the technicalities, which are that 99 percent of the calls made by subscribers should not be blocked by a busy signal and none of the successful calls should be dropped halfway through the conversation.
Of course other details like the quality of sound, avoidance of cross-talk between calls and others were easy to define and measure in the old telephony world.
These clear quality specifications meant that service providers had to dimension their network capacities to meet the pre-defined quality as defined and enforced by the regulators.
This translates into more money going into network expansions rather than investor pockets – something investors would naturally want to resist since the inclination is to make quick returns in the shortest time possible.
PROFIT MARGINS
Degrading the quality of services provided can easily make quick returns on investments.
Consider a case where investors put together X amount of funding to roll out a network that can accommodate a million subscribers - at the given pre-defined quality of service by the regulators.
The economics behind the investments is perhaps designed to make a 10 percent annual return on each dollar invested in the network for the next ten years.
Service providers can improve their profit margins by delaying or outrightly avoiding increasing their network capacities – even as their subscriber base increases, leading to congestion and degraded service levels.
Subscribers begin to experience the typical symptoms of poor quality of services in terms of a higher rate of dropped calls, more cross-talk, busy signals, amongst others.
Ideally, effective competition would cure this situation since the subscribers would vote with their feet as they move to the nearest competitor, forcing the offending provider to reset and improve their services.
However, competition is not always effective. An offending provider can hold subscribers at ransom knowing very well that they have no alternatives to their poor services.
COMPLEX SERVICES
Additionally, contemporary ICT services are extremely complex in terms of the number of actors coming together to provide a service. It is therefore difficult to lay blame on a single player for poor quality of service.
Consider making a mobile money transfer from your online banking application to your partner’s mobile money account that subscribes to a different mobile money provider.
If this transaction gets dropped or fails to go through because of the poor quality of the underlying infrastructure, do you blame your local Internet Service Provider (ISP), your banking ISP, your Telco service provider or your partner’s service provider?
With contemporary ICT services, regulators no longer have the luxury of boxing these services one one operator in order to neatly lay blame and penalize providers.
Additionally, some of these ICT services are a hybrid in terms of falling under the purview of both the financial and the ICT regulators, making the regulatory process even more complex.
This complexity of regulating modern ICT services creates a grey area that leaves the consumers at the mercy of service providers who are then at liberty to define whatever quality of standard they have as your standard.
Regulators must urgently reboot their regulatory toolbox in order to meet these challenges.
Otherwise they risk being regulated by the services providers or by Members of Parliament who in recent times have started introducing legislation which borders on the role of regulators.
Mr Walubengo is a lecturer at Multimedia University of Kenya, Faculty of Computing and IT.
Email: [email protected], Twitter: @Jwalu
