MTN and Airtel received the highest number of subscribers’ complaints regarding suspicious data depletion, according to a preliminary report of the forensic audit conducted by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC).
The forensic audit was conducted by the Compliance Monitoring and Enforcement Department (CMED) of the Commission, which investigated the four Mobile Network Operators (MNOs).
The telecom regulatory found that a total of 106 data depletion complaints had been lodged by aggrieved subscribers.
The Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive, NCC, Prof Garba Danbatta, had promised to conduct a forensic audit into the complaints due to a deluge of complaints about data depletion rate in the telecoms industry.
the way the Commission did on short message service (SMS) in which a particular operator was found to have defrauded its customers to the tune of N100 million.
According to the report, out of the 106 complaints received by the CMDE, 46 came from MTN subscribers while Airtel had 34. Glo had 19 while Emerging Markets Telecommunication Services Limited, doing business as 9mobile, had the least complaints of seven.
It was gathered that significant reasons identified for the fast depletion of subscribers data include the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic and attendant lockdown to stem community spread of the virus; periodic application update on smartphones; and conversion of mobile data to WiFi to share with other people.
On way forward to address data depletion, the report gave a number of recommendations, which included intensifying awareness campaign to educate subscribers on the need to switch off data when not in use.
The regulator advised the Consumer Affairs Bureau (CAB) of the NCC to sensitise subscribers that the first point of complaint regarding poor service delivery is their service providers.
READ ALSO: Govt’s Digital Strategy To Position Nigeria As Leading Digital Economy
Danbatta said, “NCC has instituted a forensic audit on the cost of data, just like we did with the cost of Short Message Service (SMS) on a particular mobile operator, where we discovered that the operator unlawfully surcharged its subscribers to the tune of over N100 million and we have asked the particular operator to make refunds immediately and the operator has commenced refund to the affected subscribers.
“This could have gone unnoticed, if not for the quick intervention of NCC. We have plans to even extend the forensic audit on SMS to other telecom operators.
“So, as we did for SMS, we are doing the same for data to find out the reason for fast data depletion and it will be carried out across all Mobile Network Operators (MNOs). By the time the audit is completed and the result is out, perhaps we will have better information of what is happening in the data segment, as it relates to fast data depletion.”
He said the commission did its benchmarking recently and discovered that the cost of one Gigabyte of data had come down below N500, which represents a 50 percent reduction from what it used to be.
.){kind=link}