Nigeria Threatens Carriers with Jail for Poor Coverage

April 9, 2015

By Ernest Worthman —

In Nigeria, The country’s Consumer Protection Council has now warned mobile operators that their officials may soon face criminal charges if they don’t improve wireless operations. The system is fraught with dropped calls, unsolicited texts and calls and credit losses.

Nigeria joins other African nations, such as Tanzania and Zambia, which impose prison sentences on the officials of operators that fail to provide adequate service. Zambia’s telecom regulator has already taken Airtel, MTN and Zamtel to court for failing to meet minimum quality standards. Tanzania rules include possible fines for poor service and prison terms of at least six months for unexplained network failures.

That sounds like a marvelous idea to me. We certainly don’t have the wide-scale problems that these countries do, but put a few of our top Mega-carriers executives in jail and I’ll bet that will be the end of data throttling!

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Ernest Worthman is the Editor of Small Cell magazine.