Interest groups in the telecommunication industry have begun talks with the National Communications Authority (NCA) over the implementation of domestic roaming services across the country.
This will enable customers who encounter difficulties in under-served areas obtain service from another network.
“The discussions have centred on the concept of national or domestic roaming, which is the capability of mobile customers to obtain service on another service provider’s network in cases where their service providers do not have a service or have temporarily encountered certain challenges, so, that is the concept,” Principal Manager for Engineering at the National Communications Authority, Edmund Fianko told Class News’ Ekow Parker-Wilson in an interview.
“There are a number of issues that emerged. There are technical, commercial, legal, and regulatory and financial issues that need to be addressed.”
Asked why the NCA would not focus on ensuring the telcos provide quality service to subscribers before venturing into other areas like domestic roaming, Mr Fianko said there had been a lot of improvement in the quality of services provided, but admitted it could be better.
“A lot is being done as far as improving service quality is concerned. We have a dedicated monitoring and compliance unit that is constantly doing measurements across the country and operators get report from us and get directives and occasionally do get penalised for failure to kill some of the infractions that are found. You and I will admit that services are not like they used to be, so, it is a consistently improved situation, but we know we can get better,” he noted.
