Telcos Record 9,077 Service Outages in Q2

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), the telecoms industry regulator, has revealed that major mobile network operators (MNOs) in the country have recorded 9,077 cases of service outages on their networks in the second quarter of the year.

According to NCC, the service outages resulted in unexpected disruptions to operators’ network quality of service delivery and intermittent quality of experience by the users in the second quarter of 2020.

The Executive Commissioner, Stakeholder Management at NCC, Mr. Adeleke Adewolu, disclosed this in a presentation delivered during the first Virtual Telecoms Consumer Parliament hosted by the commission in Abuja recently.

According to Adewolu, of the 9,077 service outages recorded by the operators, 3,585 were caused by incidences of denial of access to telecoms sites for maintenance; 4,972 were triggered by incidences of fibre cuts from construction activities and vandalism, while 520 cases were as a result of incidences of generator and battery theft at sites.

Adewolu, however, noted that in a proactive step to mitigate the challenges, the commission had swiftly responded by taking some major decisions to mitigate any unforeseen challenges that may cause serious disruptions in service delivery to the users throughout the period of the COVID-19 pandemic.

He said: “The commission approved resource sharing by operators throughout the period of COVID-19 pandemic. These include fibre optic cables and other resources in the event of cable cuts and other unforeseen developments.