A recent audit on the four GSM operators in Kenya conducted by Omnitele, a telecoms consulting company based in Finland finds that none of the operators have met all the requirements of the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) Act, 1998. The audit—a serious indictment on the performance of the operators—was conducted in order to get an independent expert opinion on the quality of voice service in Nairobi GSM networks. Musimba Investments, a company with interests in the telecommunications industry, commissioned the study against the backdrop of complaints about the quality of services offered by the four registered GSM operators—Safaricom, Zain, YU and Orange.According to the audit, overall, Zain is the best performing network while Safaricom falls short on most of the indicators except network coverage in Nairobi and its environs. Of the four operators, Zain meets seven of the nine of the CCK requirements. Orange meets only two of the CCK requirements while YU meets six of the requirements. While emerging tops in terms of coverage of Nairobi and its environs, Safaricom fails to meet five of the nine CCK requirements.

According to Patrick Misumba, CEO, Misumba Investments, the study was necessitated by the need to give consumers informed choices in the face of competition among the operators, who, according to the report, are yet to compete effectively on a global scale.

“We wanted consumers to know who the best operator in the market is. This report will be shared with the mobile voice service providers with a view to helping them improve in areas where they have weaknesses. Particularly important is the area of voice quality where the market leader Safaricom has a challenge according to the research”.

Omnitele conducted the survey in October 2009 in Nairobi and its environs using state-of-the-art equipment. The measured Key Performance Indicators (KPI) included call completion rate-how many 90 seconds long calls were completed successfully, call set up success rate-how many attempts were successful, call drop rate-how many calls were dropped, quality of GSM connection and voice quality-how understandable is speech over the connection. Above all, the survey also analysed other technical, service and network indicators to get the full picture of real and perceived customer quality indicators of mobile telephony service providers.

Among the objectives of the study was to compare the coverage and service performance of the local competitors and benchmark them against similar international operators. The study study also aimed at finding out if the offered service performance of the operators meets the Quality of Service (QoS) defined in the CCK licence terms.

According to the findings, Safaricom has the best network coverage in Nairobi but the lowest quality. From the end-user perspective, the low quality can be observed as problems with bad quality of voice and call disconnects during the conversation and long call set up times.  Conversely, Zain has the best overall performance on the measured KPIs. The report adds that Safaricom, YU and Zain are suffering from congested trunk lines at some point of the measurement campaign.

The report—the first of its kind in Kenya—is bound to elicit mixed reactions from the surveyed operators. A detailed analysis of the report, including the responses from the mobile operators, will be available in the December/January edition of CEO East Africa magazine, whose cover story focuses on the impact of mobile technology.