The National Communications Authority (NCA) has banned telecom operator Expresso from engaging in any sales or marketing promotions until next month.
The ban follows Expresso’s performance in the latest quality of service monitoring of cellular mobile voice services report conducted by the NCA.
The quality of service monitoring of cellular mobile voice services analyzes the performance of mobile operators in the country, to assess the user experience using the mobile voice service.
This is conducted in order to direct improvement in Quality of Service of mobile operators.
The monitoring also enhances NCA’s understanding of current problems faced by consumers to enable it work more closely with operators to improve customer experiences
According to the report Expresso had operational challenges in all the three Northern regions as well as the Eastern and Volta regions.
The NCA has directed Expresso to resolve the matter by close of this month.
With about 154,000 subscribers, Expresso owns just about 0.5 percent of the mobile voice telephony market.
In NCA’s recent market share report for February this year it revealed that Expresso continued with its decline in market share losing about 15,000 subscribers representing 9percent of its subscriber base.
The February 2014 report is based on findings on the quality of service in the three Northern, Eastern and Volta regions.
Expresso network was not available in all three Northern regions at the time of testing due to total outage of its systems serving the three regions.
The report measured 4 key items including Stand-alone Dedicated Control Channel (SDCCH) Congestion Rate, Call Setup Time (CST), Call Congestion Rate and Call Drop Rate (CDR).
The report revealed all operators had call setup delays in certain locations, which is the period of time elapsing from the sending of a target telephone number to the setting up of a call to the receiving terminal.
The NCA has also notified telecom operators of the findings in the report and suspended sanctions to defaulters pending their performance in the next monitoring findings in the same regions.
The report also accused MTN of not being in compliance with the Call Drop license threshold of less than three percent in all localities tested.
By: Rabiua Alhassan/citifmonline.com/Ghana