Telephony as a Service in Nigeria

Product Under Review: Global System for Mobiles (GSM) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)  Telephone Services in Nigeria.

Situation Report: Once upon a time, there was only one telephone company in Nigeria, and it was an almighty State monopoly, and its name was Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (NITEL). You could not get a telephone line without them. Multiple rooms in their offices were stacked full of files of applications from Nigerians desperately awaiting the allocation of their telephone numbers, but big NITEL kept saying that lines were not available, for years on end. It cost as much as =N=250,000 in official fees and kickbacks and palm greasing to get one telephone land line in Nigeria, even with the advent of the so-called 090 (naught nine naught) CDMA mobile telephony that later appeared, controlled by the same monopoly

2001 A. D.! God gave Nigeria the GSM. As soon as the first three companies that got the license went into operation, big NITEL printed banners and handouts and leaflets and flyers that said: “Have you been applying for a telephone line for a long time without success? For =N-14,000 now you can get your land line in less than two weeks” I saw one of such banners in the offices of NITEL Apapa in 2001, two weeks after I bought my first GSM SIM card and handset from MTN Saka Tinubu Street in Victoria Island, and I could not believe what my eyes were seeing. So, for all those years, I thought to myself, NITEL had land lines wasting away while they kept telling us there were no lines? Well, the rest is now history and we all know that NITEL is not almighty anymore. Not only is it not almighty anymore, NITEL is dead! that’s right, dead, muerto, caput, finito, that’s what NITEL is. Maybe some day somebody will raise it from the dead, but presently it is in the grave. That has been the fate of State controlled businesses in Nigeria, and that is another story for another day.

The original GSM companies were MTN, ECONET (which has changed its name a million times since inception and is now known as AIRTEL), and MTEL, which was NITEL’s own new GSM concern, which it managed together with its old CDMA and moribund landlines. Much later, GLOBACOM was born, and many more years later, ETISALAT (which also changed its name to 9Mobile), joined them.

At about the same time, a number of CDMA telephony companies were also licensed, and there were more of them than for GSM, but their reign did not last long as they all disappeared one by one. The first of them was MULTILINKS. Then there was STARCOMMS, INTERCELLULAR, MOBITEL, EMIS, MTS First Wireless, RELIANCE TELECOM, which became RELTEL WIRELESS, which became ZOOM, and VISAFONE, which came last and, by its superior operations, proved to be the king of them all, but like all the CDMA concerns, it also developed problems, but before it could disappear, it was snapped up by MTN, which saw an opportunity in Visafone’s 700 MHz spectrum for its upcoming 4G LTE service.

CDMA is now history in Nigeria. If any other one is still alive, I have not heard of it in years, but for me personally, I found the CDMA (Voice and Data) of Visafone better than all the GSM I had used in Nigeria, and I had used them all. Sadly, there was little patronage for CDMA. I never understood why and I kept thinking it would improve with better awareness campaign.

GSM or CDMA, they all have in them the good, the bad and the ugly. Truth be told, the liberalisation of the telephone service has been a big blessing to Nigerians, compared to when it was just the big, ugly monopoly. We all have telephones now, including the primary school kids waiting playfully for the driver to come take them home after school and the baba n bola who carts away your rubbish every morning. The access of the telephone to all has greatly ameliorated the Nigerian standard of living. That is good news on the good side, and that is the way it is supposed to be. Over the years, the highly exorbitant prices they started with have come down. I bought my SIM card in the beginning for twenty thousand Naira, but today, it is as cheap as two hundred Naira. Competition also brought down the prices of phone calls before the advent of the GSM Internet data service, which highly increased the income these telephone companies make, but the call rates insidiously went back up over time.  

GSM providers in Nigeria have had their ups and downs and have evolved over the past twenty years. On the bad and ugly side, Nigerians have suffered and keep suffering bad treatment from the telephone companies, in the form of high prices, network problems, and systematic wrongful deduction of their prepaid customers’ money, in brazen spams and scams – unwanted and highly annoying text messages and marketing telephone calls, myriads of them daily, and, wait for it, FRAUDULENT SHORT-CODE LOTTERY TYPE ABRACADABRA by which they send you an SMS urging you to press *ABRACADABRA# to subscribe to a certain service at a certain amount of money per day or week or month. If you don’t press anything and just delete the text, meaning that you don’t want that service, what do they do? They subscribe you by force and start deducting your money, and they make it impossible for you to unsubscribe. That is another story we were going to tell here, because Nigerians were tired of that ugly side of telephony in this country and because the regulator of the Industry, NCC, warned them to stop the bad practice, but they instead increased it. However, they finally stopped it about five years ago only after heavy threats of sanctions, but once in a while, they still try it one more time to see if we have forgotten how much we lost to such scams.

The ugly story is a long one but I will cut it short. When Internet services, which started at cybercafes through VSAT, became available by GSM, the phone companies’ income jumped high through the high cost they put on data service, but over the years, competition also brought the data prices down.

However, one thing that has remained constant for twenty years is what Nigerian have come to know as ‘network problem’: the daily fluctuation in network availability for call and data and, later, the low quality of the data service. The bandwidth is narrow and shared among too many users, so that one user gets bandwidth so frustratingly low one cannot open a webpage in the time it takes to download a big file, and sometimes it is worse than that. Yet, the telephone companies insult you by saying they are giving you broadband. No, it is not broadband and it fluctuates too much, giving us perpetual network problem. Recently, that network problem is so bad I buy a 30-day data bundle of 12GB, I connect to the Internet every day and every hour. It is connected but it cannot open a webpage, for days on end, so much that at the end of 30 days, I still have 10GB of data left out of the 12GB bundle, not because I did not use it but because it is not working. Yet you are forced to renew the bundle or lose the unused data. I renew by buying another 12GB, total now is 22GB, I get the same not-working experience for another 30 days, at the end of which you have 20GB unused data left. Thus, at the end of 90 days, I had about 30GB of unused data left, which I was going to lose for no fault of mine; and yes, I lost the 30GB because I refused to renew the bundle after three months of you know what. Complaining is useless because you would not get a refund.

That is how bad the data service network problem has become in Nigeria, so bad that, for instance, the SMS alerts that used to arrive at the moment a financial transaction took place now frequently arrives in 24 hours or later, including the e-mails, and curiously, this is only when it is time to credit you. When it is time to debit you, however, that alert never fails to come the moment the transaction is done. Curious!