Congolese Regulator Understudies Nigeria’s Telecoms Market

The Congo-Brazzaville Telecommunications Regulations Authority (CTRA) has indicated interest in understudying Nigeria’s telecommunications market.
The Congolese team led by CTRA’s Network Director, Benjamin Mouandza, made this known when it visited the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) on a benchmarking tour in Abuja, recently.
In a letter written to the Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, Prof. Umar Danbatta, the Congloese regulator indicated interest in gaining more insights into three areas of NCC’s regulatory activities, namely, management of issues associated with Quality of Service (QoS), SIM Boxing and Call Masking, as well as telecom equipment type-approval process.
The Congolese team spent three days at the NCC Head Office in Abuja, where it was exposed to key result-oriented regulatory activities, frameworks, programmes and policies of NCC, with the objective to explore how such operational frameworks could be adapted by the African nation noted for its huge rainforest reserves.
In response, Danbatta had graciously accepted the CTRA’s request and further directed relevant departments of NCC, including Special Duties (SD), Technical Standards and Network Integrity (TSNI); and the Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement (CME) directorates to interact with the team to provide necessary information sharing that may be useful to the Congolese counterpart.
Addressing the CTRA team, the NCC’s Director, TSNI, Bako Wakil, spoke extensively on the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) institued by NCC on QoS and how these KPIs are measured and monitored by the Commission toward ensuring improved service delivery to the Nigeria’s ever-growing telecoms consumers.
On type-approval process, Wakil stated that the Commission had developed a rigorous type-approval process to ensure that telecoms equipment, including terminal devices, manufactured in line with international standards and specifications are brought into the country.
“NCC is serious about type-approval process like other processes, because non-type approved devices and equipment which are also not manufactured to international standards and specifications have negative implications for quality of service delivery on the networks”, he said.
Wakil also spoke extensively on ‘call masking’ and highlighted measures the NCC had put in place to address the menace.
He described call masking as “the practice of sending international calls to an operator but disguising the calls as if they were local by sending the calls on the local interconnect route with a local number in the national numbering plan instead of the original international calling number”.
It will be recalled that the visit by the Congolese team came barely a month after the NCC hosted officials from Sierra Leone’s National Telecommunications Commission (NATCOM), who equally visited NCC to benchmark the Nigeria’s telecom regulator’s policies, programmes and regulatory activities.
Over the years, the NCC has constantly received delegations from telecoms regulators in Africa and this trend has remained a major boost for Nigeria’s global ranking as a model in telecommunications regulation.