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You Are Here: Home » ICT, Lead Story » Call quality will get worse – Ghana mobile phone companies warn
While consumers are agitating for better quality service from telecom operators, some service providers and telecom experts have predicted that call quality would even become worse when the government’s inbound international calls monitoring programme becomes fully operational.
Mr Isaac Cudjoe, Head of Corporate Communications at Vodafone Ghana, told Ghana News Agency that the foreign company hired to monitor inbound international calls would bring additional equipment, which would worsen the already problematic general call quality in the country.
“Our industry already has an innate call quality problem and we are bringing on more equipment to further worsen it,” he said.
Mr Bob Palitz, a telecom consult and former Managing Director of Kasapa Telecom, agreed with Mr Cudjoe, saying that the call signals would have to go through the Intelligence Signal Management System (ISMS) equipment and that could affect the quality of the call at the receiving end.
He added that due to monitoring, lots of people would also resort to the fraudulent bypass system and that could also increase poor quality of calls since the sim boxes used for perpetrating the bypass also tended to interfere with the quality of the signals.
In spite of the fact that all five fully operational telecom service providers in Ghana are multi-nationals who claim to have brought the best telephony technology to the country, their subscribers, all together numbering over 15 million, continue to experience a myriad of network challenges through which subscribers lose money, business deals and sometimes relationships.
Some of the challenges include frequent call drops, cross calls, speech mutations, and calls not going through, wrong voice prompts, connection error and several others.
The Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), led by Mr Kofi Kapito, on Thursday, May 27, led a cross-section of Ghanaians to switch off their mobile phones for six hours in protest of poor quality network service.
The CPA also went on a march and presented a petition to the Minister of Communications on that same day to register their grievances, and asked the Minister to take steps to ensure that telecom operators gave their subscribers value for money.
Contrary to the hopes of CPA and many Ghanaians, Vodafone says that government’s move to monitor inbound international calls to generate more revenue for the state was rather threatening to worsen call quality, particularly calls from overseas to Ghana.
But government says it would go ahead with the call monitoring to prevent the heavy losses of about 5.8 million dollars a month in taxes on inbound international calls.
Fraudsters suspected to be conniving with some unidentified persons within telecom companies both in Ghana and abroad have been re-routing inbound international calls through sim boxes rigged in a manner that enables them to make international calls terminate on people’s handsets as local numbers.
That way the fraudsters succeed in making the call look like a local call and both the local telecom operators and government lose money in the form of tariffs and taxes respectively, on those calls.
The Ministry of Communications said it had been able to ascertain the actual quantum of the losses through the help of a Haitian company, Global Voices Group (GVG) SA, which had been contracted by government to help the National Communications Authority (NCA) to undertake call verification in the country.
Government has therefore asked all telecom operators to start charging a fix rate 0.19 dollar a minute for all inbound international calls, saying that with strict monitoring by GVG and NCA, it was sure to generate at least 60 million dollars a year in the form of taxes on inbound international calls only.
Some consumer rights groups such as the Alliance for Accountable Government have challenged the employment of GVG, citing the compromise of national security and the privacy of phone users, procedural breaches in their appointment among other things.
But government has insisted that there were laws that protected people’s privacy and national security in this whole process.
Meanwhile, telecom operators have said that in spite of the laws, in practice, there was no way that people’s private data and national security were protected from being seen and manipulated by handlers of the monitoring equipment.
Source: GNA
How low can we go?
Now seeking help from Haiti? Oh! My goodness.
How can the rising star of Africa sink so low.
When are we going to stop going around begging and start doing something for ourselves.
Too bad. What at is so fanciful about a Haitian company?
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the whole wild world and that`s where we are seeking help. GOD save the MOTHERLAND.
That is nice of the Government. Instead of bringing in modern equipments for wireless communication and other forms it , VOIP, and Internet Enhancement as a whole what they know is Taxes on imported USED products.
They have their projections of 60 million dollars, We shall advice ourselves, Many business transactions would go down, foreign direct transfers as well. When some of us work hard abroad monies that could have been spent here is sent to families that is capital transfer to hard work. Investors in our country transfer monies they make in Ghana trhough their Intelligence with machines. What are we doing as Ghanaians.
The government make me feel so disapointed I am part of this country, because when they travel and school they dont learn anything. I am mean nothing!
How did it happen that we could not manage Ghana Telecom, Valco and Ghana airways. Kenya has its own, Egypt, Morroco they are alive and moving airways. SHAME on our governance. When shall rise and implement our scientific, political, business and industrial KNOWLEDGE, we acquire home and abroad. SHAME absolute shame on us.
Raged!
Politics is not my cup of tea, what I do know is that I used to pay 15 cents per minute and now it is 21 cents, and the quality remains the same
It’s really difficult to make any assessment without understanding the underlying technology to some degree. I tried to dig up info on it using the terminology in the article (Intelligence Signal Management System) and it seems to be a term that’s peculiar to Ghana government; there was nothing I could find that either directly or indirectly suggested how they were doing the intercept.
The question substantially revolves around the format of the signal being monitored and where in the transmission that monitoring occurs. Intercepting an analog signal in transit, diverting to a recording device and then retransmitting it is completely different from copying a digitized packet of data and analyzing it in parallel with the original transmission. The first method would certainly DEGRADE THE SIGNAL; the second, maybe not.
If ther is any way of getting more details of the method, maybe I could be more insightful.
Projected savings of $60 million p.a.?! How much of that money will go to pay the Haitian Co.( Haiti has existed more than 100 years as a free country in the western hemisphere and is abjectly so poor it is a shame like most “black-ruled” nations, and yet it is a saving grace for Ghana Telecom! ), line the pockets of the small and big guns in the corridors of the ministry of communication and then leftover to benefit the govt. and by extension the so called bastardized poor masses?
Mr Minister of Communication by all means use all your savvy of the communication technology trend to tax where tax is due but also apply it to the functionnality of rudimentary telecom in offices in Ghana. Recently in my visit to Lands commission in Accra, an official has to use his personal mobile phone to communicate with an officer in adjacent office of the same govt. premises. NO updates since Nkrumah (God bless his soul) days. Yet we are tauted as the beacon of the “New Africa”.
In my recent May visit, all I saw around me and in Korle Bu and Cocoa clinic respectively is retrogression instead of moving forward, but that is account from my dairy in another write up.
This is ridiculous! All of a sudden rates increase and theres no way to make calls to my family in Ghana for cheap except for one company named VIP Communications who has a rate of 12.9c/minute. I refuse to pay higher rates!