NCA Challenges Tigo

THE NATIONAL Communications Authority (NCA) has challenged Millicom Ghana Limited, operators of Tigo network, for publishing a report contrary to what the former has carried as regards network rankings.

In its 2011 report, Tigo maintained that it was still the second leading operator in Ghana despite an earlier report by the NCA that Vodafone Ghana was the second leading network.

According to the regulator (NCA), it was the only authority mandated to report on the telecoms industry in the country. Per its 2011 report therefore, Vodafone finished the year as second leading operator with 4.2 million subscribers, representing 20.2 percent market share while Tigo came third with 3.9 million subscribers, representing 18.53 percent of the market share.

NCA also noted in its full year subscriber base report that the total mobile penetration for year ending 2011 was 21.2 million.

However, according to Tigo’s annual report published on myjoyonline.com, it closed the year with 3.5million subscribers, and not 3.9 million, which represented 21.3 percent of the market share.

Tigo’s report also stated that mobile penetration in Ghana was 16.53 million as opposed to the 21.2 million stated by the NCA.

Per Tigo’s report, its 3.5 million subscriber base was 21.3 percent of 16.53 million subscribers, which made it the second largest among five operators in Ghana.

A source at NCA, in an interview with this paper, said Tigo could not claim to be the second leading operator because the NCA received monthly reports from the telecom operators in Ghana. Based on these reports, the regulator is able to determine the number of subscribers that each operator has.

The source, who spoke on behalf of NCA, stated that “the authority’s report, among other things, includes the number of active subscribers and the number of churned out registered subscribers.”

The source noted that MTN, the leading operator in the country, had over 10.2 million subscribers, which was a well documented fact; therefore Tigo’s claim of a total subscriber base of 16.53 million was shocking.

According to the report, “Millicom reports to NCA subscribers up to 90 days of activity, according to NCA policy, but internally, we report to headquarters up to 60 days of no activity.”

Explaining the foregoing, a highly placed official at Tigo explained that figures in Tigo’s annual report were based on how many Tigo subscribers were active within the last 60 days up to December 31, 2011, adding that, that was different from how many subscribers were active within the last 90 days.

The official further explained that “within 60 days, every subscriber from any other network that makes a call or sends an SMS to a Tigo number, even for once, is captured as an active subscriber for that network. And when we put those figures plus our own subscribers together, we determine the mobile penetration,” the official said. This, according to the NCA official, was not practicable, as an operator could not determine the number of active calls or number of SMS from another operator.