Mobile phone call quality to become worse - Operators

Accra, June 1, GNA - While consumers are agitating for better quality service from telecom operators, some service providers and telecom experts have predicted that call quality would even become worse when the government's inbound international calls monitoring programme becomes fully operational. Mr Isaac Cudjoe, Head of Corporate Communications at Vodafone Ghana, told Ghana News Agency that the foreign company hired to monitor inbound international calls would bring additional equipment, which would worsen the already problematic general call quality in the country.

"Our industry already has an innate call quality problem and we are bringing on more equipment to further worsen it," he said.

Mr Bob Palitz, a telecom consult and former Managing Director of Kasapa Telecom, agreed with Mr Cudjoe, saying that the call signals would have to go through the Intelligence Signal Management System (ISMS) equipment and that could affect the quality of the call at the receiving end. He added that due to monitoring, lots of people would also resort to the fraudulent bypass system and that could also increase poor quality of calls since the sim boxes used for perpetrating the bypass also tended to interfere with the quality of the signals.

In spite of the fact that all five fully operational telecom service providers in Ghana are multi-nationals who claim to have brought the best telephony technology to the country, their subscribers, all together numbering over 15 million, continue to experience a myriad of network challenges through which subscriber lose money, business deals and sometimes relationships.

Some of the challenges include frequent call drops, cross calls, speech mutations, and calls not going through, wrong voice prompts, connection error and several others.

The Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), led by Mr Kofi Kapito, on Thursday, May 27, led a cross-section of Ghanaians to switch off their mobile phones for six hours in protest of poor quality network service.

The CPA also went on a march and presented a petition to the Minister of Communications on that same day to register their grievances, and asked the Minister to take steps to ensure that telecom operators gave their subscribers value for money.

Contrary to the hopes of CPA and many Ghanaians, Vodafone says that government's move to monitor inbound international calls to generate more revenue for the state was rather threatening to worsen call quality, particularly calls from overseas to Ghana. But government says it would go ahead with the call monitoring to prevent the heavy losses of about 5.8 million dollars a month in taxes on inbound international calls.

Fraudsters suspected to be conniving with some unidentified persons within telecom companies both in Ghana and abroad have been re-routing inbound international calls through sim boxes rigged in a manner that enables them to make international calls terminate on people's handsets as local numbers.

That way the fraudsters succeed in making the call look like a local call and both the local telecom operators and government lose money in the form of tariffs and taxes respectively, on those calls. The Ministry of Communications said it had been able to ascertain the actual quantum of the losses through the help of a Haitian company, Global Voices Group (GVG) SA, which had been contracted by government to help the National Communications Authority (NCA) to undertake call verification in the country.

Government has therefore asked all telecom operators to start charging a fix rate 0.19 dollar a minute for all inbound international calls, saying that with strict monitoring by GVG and NCA, it was sure to generate at least 60 million dollars a year in the form of taxes on inbound international calls only.

Some consumer rights groups such as the Alliance for Accountable Government have challenged the employment of GVG, citing the compromise of national security and the privacy of phone users, procedural breaches in their appointment among other things. But government has insisted that there were laws that protected people's privacy and national security in this whole process. Meanwhile, telecom operators have said that in spite of the laws, in practice, there was no way that people's private data and national security were protected from being seen and manipulated by handlers of the monitoring equipment.