By Mustapha Kamara Junior
Subscribers of Airtel, one of Sierra Leone’s telecommunication and internet service providers, have expressed dissatisfaction over the poor network services provided by the company for the past two months.
The mobile phone operator, being the oldest in the country, has being providing mobile and internet services to many Sierra Leoneans at home and abroad for over 10 years.
An Airtel subscriber and business woman who trade in used clothes at Pademba Road in Freetown, Hannah Wanga, said she had observed that the network was far more terrible than it ever used to be before.
Explaining to Politico, Wanga said there was hardly network on her phone for her to make a call, even “when my phone is on. I can’t even make a call. It is so frustrating when you are trying to call someone and you can’t reach them,” she said. She said a good number of her contacts had been complaining about her phone always being off “but that is never the case, it is just the poor network.”
Wanga also recalled many times she had even used the internet data with difficulty, even with the highly advertised ‘Bomber Browsing’.
The business woman also complained of high billing per calls made through the network, saying the bills hardly summed up to the minutes spent talking on the phone.
Another subscriber, Ansumanna Bangura, a driver, said the issue of Airtel providing poor network for its subscribers was habitual. He said he always got the notification about a number he may be trying to call being off but when checked, the numbers were always on.
“You get a notification that the Airtel number you are trying to call is switched off, even when the number may actually be on,” Bangura said.
Again, another subscriber of the company, Tamba Tengbeh, a journalist, accused the service provider of being “deceitful.”
“I sometimes subscribe to the latest Airtel Bomba Promotion, the ‘Bomba Wan Pot and Bomba Browsing so that I can be able to access my Facebook, Whatapp and Twitter on my phone but I can’t access it, sometimes for the whole day”, Tengbeh said.
He said he would sometimes switch his phone off and on with the hope that the network would be okay but “there’s never any success.”
E-voucher (top up) sellers told Politico that they had had lots of complaint from their customers with regards not receiving credits in time. Sometimes, the business people said, they have had to wait for long periods before there is network coverage for them to sell out their e-vouchers, by which time many customers would have given up on them.
Many of the subscribers who spoke to Politico said they were considering switching to other network operators.
Meanwhile, many subscribers blamed the National Telecommunications Commission (NATCOM) for not holding the service provider accountable for the bad network it was providing in the country.
But NATCOM’s Public Affairs Manager, Larry Fofanah, explained to Politico that the commission had been working relentlessly with service providers in the country to address issues of poor service to the nation.
He said the commission had a special complaint committee which had been set up to listen to address complaints brought to them by the public regarding services provided by mobile operators, internet service providers and other telecommunications operators in the country.
“Such complaints are not new. We have been receiving them and have been engaging those that are being complained about so that they could address their problems,” Fofanah said.
The PRO revealed that NATCOM had procured a “quality of service monitoring” machine that would be used to monitor and measure dropped calls, call successions and other network problems by mobile phone operators.
The monitoring machine, he said, would enable the commission to know if mobile companies were meeting the key performance indicators. He said disciplinary actions would be taken against any mobile company that would fail to provide better services to its subscribers.
At a meeting of the Parliamentary Oversight Committee on Information last month, a member of the committee, honourable Jusufu Mansaray, expressed dissatisfaction with the state of affairs in the telecommunications sector.
The MP said even President Ernest Bai Koroma had expressed disappointment over the operations of mobile phone service providers, particularly Airtel. He described the Indian owned subsidiary of as a disappointment to the country but blamed it all on the Ministry of Information and Communication for its failure to ensure that the mobile company provided better services for its subscribers.
At that meeting, MP Mansaray also criticized NATCOM for “ineffectiveness” and for failing to address complaints brought before its complaint committee.
© Politico 21/04/15
