The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is believed to be working to ensure that the about 153 million subscribers in the sector are only exposed to seven tariff plans, especially on data services.
This is coming against the background of several complaints and confusions that have greeted close to 400 different tariff plans currently in existence.
It is discovered that there are 369 tariff plans for both voice and data services in the sector, largely from mobile network operators (MNOs) like MTN, Airtel, Globacon and 9mobile.
The Director of Consumer Affairs, Nigerian Communications Commission ((NCC), Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde, gave a hint on this at a media capacity training for journalists in Lagos, yesterday, November 14, when said that the Commission is working to streamline MNOs to seven tariff plans each for data services, which will be bundled in about 100 to include SMS, data and promos, for better understanding of the users and easy monitoring by the NCC.
Against this background, MTN as the largest operator, currently has 159 tariffs, with 14 for voice and 145 for data. Airtel has 27 for voice and 41 for data services. Globacom has six for voice and 32 for data, while 9mobile with seven voice plans and 97 for data.
A significant proportion of the tariffs are currently being presented by the providers as promos and were originally promos that were subsequently converted into tariff plans, which present pricing uncertainty and diversity of plans.
On pricing, operators apply different effective tariffs to bonus accounts, resulting in different tariffs for the main account and bonus account, and this information is not communicated to consumers, which may lead to uninformed decision.
The Commission is insisting that all current ‘tariffs’ featuring bonuses or promotional elements should be classified strictly as promotions and thus should be submitted to the Consumer Affairs Bureau for quality-of-service evaluation.
Telecoms operators will be mandated to explain all benefits or allowances (voice SMS and Data) in a clear, uniform and user-friendly format that is the number of minutes/SMS, cost per minute/SMS, available and total data in MG/GB and validity periods.
“Similar to the India experience, the Commission has placed a limit on the number of tariff plans an operator can offer at any given point in time,” a source hinted.
The Commission wants tariff to be simplified, and targeted at bringing transparency to the sector and reducing complaints.
It’s observed that aside from complaints around poor services, tariff extortion is another major challenge of subscribers, “and we are looking at it critically.
