For long the negative impact on Quality of Service (QoS) was only annoying but did not exceed a critical level. Nowadays, the stakes have changed: Regulators have started to boldly enforce regulations in order to ensure high Quality of Service (QoS). Operators get fined for missing QoS criteria. Moreover, regulators can and do ban operators from accepting new customers until the QoS will be enhanced.
One of the most recent examples for such regulatory enforcement is Nigeria. In February 2014, the Nigerian Communication Commission sanctioned three out of four major network operators for breach of key performance indicators and poor QoS. Although the fined operators missed e.g. the ‘Call Setup Success Rate’ and the ‘Drop Call Rate’ closely, they missed them.
An INdT study showed that substandard and fake phones failed in 26% of call attempts. 24% of established calls were dropped. Additionally, in places where a genuine phone could work perfectly, substandard and fake phones would not be usable because of their lower quality of transmission when compared to original phones. There were also issues with cell handover, the phone’s ability to maintain the call while moving between cells: handover time was 41% longer than original phones and 34% of calls were dropped during the handover.
In 2012, Dr Eugene Juwah, the Executive Chairman of NCC, said that 60% of the mobile telephones in the country were substandard. It would be worthwhile to investigate to what extent the affected Nigerian operators had not missed these criteria, if no or less substandard and fake phones were registered on their networks. Thus, increasing joint efforts to tackle the problem of substandard and fake phones would pay back for all.
More information:
http://leadership.ng/nga/articles/50842/2013/03/25/ncc_warns_telecom_subscribers_substandard_phones.html 