The Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) tasks telecom operators to provide robust Quality of Service (QoS) for customers.
Quality-of-Service encompasses the tools and technologies that enable telco operators to ensure networks, applications, and services are highly performant regardless of network capacity.
Issues such as call drop rate, which is the percentage of calls, which are unintentionally disconnected mid-conversation without the user’s intervention, can harm QoS, which is why telcos are punished whenever that happens.
An amendment to the Kenya ICT Act, named the Kenya Information and Communications (Amendment) Bill, 2022 is now recommending that a telco is liable to credit a consumer who initiated a call that gets cut out after a connection by KES 10 worth of airtime for each call drop within its network for a maximum of three call drops per day.
However, while that might the case, a telco is not liable to compensate a consumer, when a call gets cut out due to third-party interference on the carrier’s connection lines or an inevitable accident.
Back in 2018, the CA launched a system to measure the quality of services provided to consumers on mobile telephony networks.
The Quality-of-Service Monitoring System (QSMS) is based on three key components: network performance, customer experience as well as end-to-end performance that analyses the rate of dropped calls, call connection time, and voice/data quality.
The CA also widened the segments of services to be assessed, which now include, SMS and mobile internet services.
In the previous system, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs), only had the voice calls quality measured on eight indicators, including call success rate, call drop rate and completed calls, among others.
Telcos are required to submit raw data on their network performance on an hourly basis to CA, while on the quality of experience,
