The good news with my Airtel line is that I get to call 2 special numbers for 2k/s. Also with my Glo line I can call 5 special numbers for 5k/s.
The bad news is the two kobo service I'm getting. Why? Anytime me and my babyboo start to say something important, the call is dropped. Every two to five minutes, a dropped call.
But texts are worse. In the past few days, I've recorded only about one in every four text messages delivered. You can imagine the madness, when people exchange text messages and the sender gets billed (and gets a delivery confirmation) and the receiver gets nada, nothing to hint that a message was ever sent. Things were better when text messages at least bounced with a "message undelivered" report, so you could retry or at least be aware that the message failed.
Nowadays I just call rather than text if I want a little more reliability, before they spoil my market for me. From the phone company's standpoint, that may be more revenue, but isn't it more channel-intensive to phone, and aren't the phone networks already congested, so shouldn't they encourage people to rather text than call, rather BBM than browse, until they can beef up their facilities?
Last week I sent a text to my friend who was sitting next to me in the car. It arrived several minutes later. :)
It's been a terrible summer for Nigerian phone users. I know we've said that before, but really things got better then got a lot worse this summer.
As for internet, well...
The internet modem speeds have
gone up on average. Up-time too. (I use Visafone.)
That's the good news.
See a
brief history of my internet service (disservice).
The
blackberry plan by Airtel is currently quite rubbish (I'm mostly on Lagos Mainland, it might be much better on the Island or other states.) I want a refund, seriously, the thing is down more than it's up. And when it's up, it's most useful for sending quick emails. It's also reasonably useful for BB chats, which I don't use. But when I tried, chat messages took several minutes to zoom across the Atlantic.
Using their so-called Complete Blackberry plan with a browser, e.g. searching for a word online in google takes real patience...enter the search item, count to 100 in Chinese, then MAYBE it will return a results page, or maybe you will have to retry/cancel your effort, or maybe you'll fall asleep waiting.
The
blackberry plan by Glo was better, but then I switched my Glo phone to a non-BB to take advantage of their G-BAM with very basic internet for N5 per day. I noticed Glo stopped deducting my daily five naira, which makes sense because the service provision was down to just about zero and I was starting to wonder if my N150 a month wouldn't be better spent eating cassava bread or something. The great thing about Glo is that when they screw up, they fix it before people get too angry. Unlike
MTN which I wouldn't touch with a long bamboo stick. Really.
MTN IS REALLY REALLY BAD.
There has to be a solution.
Regulatory:
I thought government said no more promos, but see the proliferation of promos and the death spiral of quality. Can we really afford to have undelivered text messages (billed and masked as delivered?) What if somebody dies? What if somebody loses business? What if me and babyboo break up because of this stupid service lol.
Technical:
Naija! Naija! Naija! How many times did I call you? Are you the first ones to use mobile telephony? Or to use electric power? How come what works in other developed and developing countries would come here and suddenly be a source of drama? Mobile phones and internet browsing are becoming more popular, does that not mean the phone companies need to increase or rationalize their resources?
First, let me ask:
Have the network engineers, telecom managers, been given any mandates to ease congestion?
If so, aren't there methods out there to simply copy? Google "Network Congestion Technical" or something.
If not, (more likely to be the case since there seems to be no penalty for bad service), then back to the regulation question. Let me be paid (a refund plus 100%) for every bounced message. Let me be paid a small apology fee for every dropped call. Give me back my 400 naira plus an apology for the poor 'complete blackberry' service. See how the quality of service can improve once it starts costing something to give poor service.
Another way to 'make it cost something' is to
publish comparative data on the available services. A weekly report, for example, showing for each service provider:
- Up-time/Down-time? (For phone, for internet, with reasonable thresholds/cut-offs, e.g. 5kb/s internet is off/down let's be real. Phone access switching between 0 and 1 bar is no access )
- How many bars?
- Call drop behaviour?
- Failed texts? (Failed texts should NEVER happen, it's just wrong and dangerous)
- Delayed texts? (Texts delayed under 2 mins and texts delayed over 2 mins might be counted separately)
This might let everybody take advantage of the
number-portablility to dump the worst service-providers.
