The Minister of Communications, Digital Technology and Innovation, Sam George has assured Ghanaians that in the next few months there will be marked improvement in the quality of telecoms services because he has bonded the telcos to investment heavily in that regard, instead of fining them for recent breaches.Â
At a recent media engagement to announced the take off of the first phase of the government’s One Million Coders Programme, the Minister also used the platform to announce that he has by a policy decision gotten two telcos to agree to build an unprecedented 1,150 new cell sites this year alone to improve quality of service significantly.
He observed that over the years, telcos had been fined heavily for failing to meet quality of service KPIs (key performance indicators) and all the proceeds of the fines had been kept and spent by the National Communications Authority (NCA), with consumers not deriving any benefit from those fines.
Indeed, Techfocus24 gathered that, following the recent quality of service breaches, the NCA initially informed the telcos of plans to slap them with fines as usual. But the Minister stepped in and rather asked that the telcos should be bonded to invest even more than what they would have paid in fines to improve the network quality for the benefit of consumers.
Years back, the Network of Communications Reporters (NCR), proposed bonded investment and compensations to consumers as better alternatives to fines, which did not benefit consumers in anyway. Their argument then was that bonded investments helps to improve the quality of service for consumers and compensations also strengthen the goodwill between consumers and the telcos. But fines benefit consumers in no way.
But as it were, past government officials and NCA directors at the time turned deaf ears on those proposals, because the fines made them richer at the expense of the very consumers, who they exist to protect. By law, the NCA gets to keep and spend those fines for their operations and only report to the finance ministry without making deposits into the consolidated fund.
At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC 26) in Barcelona, Spain, Sam George told Techfocus24 in an exclusive interview that he believed “bonded investments” was a more efficient and consumer-centric way of addressing quality of service issues than fines.
He explained that the recent adjustment in quality of service KPIs from 3% allowable breaches to just 1% was based on a policy directive by the Ministry to drive investments in the network to ensure the consumers are given better services.
“As a result of that policy directive Telecel Ghana is now building 350 new sites this year alone; and MTN Ghana initially announced that they were going to build 500 new cell sites, but I met with the Group CEO at MWC and I told him that MTN Ghana is an SMP and they therefore needed to do better. So he agreed to add 300 more sites to make a total of 800 in one year,” he said.
To put that in perspective, the Minister said this is the first time MTN Ghana is building that number of cell sites in just one year.
The records would show that over the last ten years, the highest number of cell sites MTN Ghana has built in one year is 342, and that was in 2017 and 2019.
The figures are as follows:
2016 – 134 sites
2017 – 352 sites
2018 – 300 sites
2019 – 352 sites
2020 – 200 sites
2021 – 120 sites
2022 – 342 sites
2023 – 350 sites
2024 – 30 sites
2025 –Â 50 sites
2026 – 800 sites
The figures above show that on the average, MTN Ghana has been building 223 sites per year over the last ten years, and so the 800 sites it has committed to build this year is almost four times its yearly average.
The Minister expressed his profound gratitude to MTN Ghana and Telecel Ghana for the respective commitment to improving quality of service for consumers and expressed the hope that in the next few months, Ghanaians will begin to experience the benefits of that heavy investment from the two telcos.
