KIGALI, Sept 21 (Reuters) – Rwanda’s telecoms regulator said
it would fine the country’s unit of South African
telecommunications group MTN for the second time in
four years for poor quality service.
MTN Rwanda is the by far the country’s largest mobile phone
operator with about two thirds of its subscribers.
The regulator on Thursday said it had carried out a survey
in August showing MTN had failed to meet minimum thresholds on
call completion rate, speech quality, signal strength and other
measures, the regulator said.
MTN said an independent technical teams had carried out
another survey of its Rwandan networks the following month and
found no major problems.
The September survey found that “despite hitches that
sometimes might be beyond our control like fibre cuts, our
network is operating within all Key Performance Indicators in
our license obligations,” MTN said.
MTN will be fined 3,000,000 Rwandan francs ($4,788) for each
day in which they do not comply with the notice, for a maximum
of one month, the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) said
in a statement.
It warned of further unspecified actions should MTN fail to
improve its services.
Johannesburg-based MTN, which owns 80 percent of the Rwandan
operation, said it has been trying to improve its services since
receiving an initial warning by the regulator in March this
year.
In 2009, the regulator fined MTN Rwanda $140,000, saying it
had failed to roll out network upgrades or address problems such
as dropped calls.
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