A comprehensive report of a seminal study undertaken by PriceWaterhouseCoopers for the telecommunication industry in Nigeria with a thematic focus on cost based determination of mobile voice termination rate, was presented to industry stakeholders today at the Nigerian Communications Commission Head Office in Abuja.
Consistent with NCC's principled commitment to participatory regulation, a broad spectrum of industry players and other stakeholders attended the event which kick-started another project of the Commission aimed at re-positioning the telecom sector for greater heights.
Professor Umar Garba Danbatta, Executive Vice Chairman of NCC in his remarks delivered by Miss Josephine Amuwa, Director Policy Competition and Economic Analysis at the Commission, called on stakeholders to supply industry statistical data promptly because of its centrality in the determination of appropriate interconnection termination rates.
An impeccable and functional interconnection regime is pivotal to enhancing competition and effective regulation. The imperative of the project evidently found expression in the exponential growth in the number of subscribers, as well as in the volume of traffic on the networks, which are both shaped by the dynamics of technologies, and the existential realities of the global financial markets. Danbatta told the audience which is quite representative of the diversity of the industry.
Importantly, Danbatta noted that NCC has a duty to ensure that interconnection services are fairly priced, non-discriminatory, and reflect the real cost of providing such services in the market. He was quite pleased that the study will among other benefits provide opportunity to thoroughly examine the emergence of grey market activities in the telecoms industry in Nigeria such as call refiling, call masking, and SIM-Box fraud following the introduction of an interim International Termination Rate (ITR) for inbound international traffic.
Accordingly, the Study's eleven (11) focus areas include developing measures to reduce or eliminate grey markets in the telecoms industry in Nigeria; evaluation of the subsisting interconnect regime; and to determine if there is need for different termination rate for national/domestic and international traffic.