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Court Orders MTN, Celtel to Compensate Subscribers

Nigeria Today
1st April '08

Court upholds ruling as operators frantically try to avoid reimbursing subscribers.

A Federal High Court in Lagos, has insisted that MTN and Celtel must compensate their subscribers over poor quality of service experienced as at January 31. The regulator, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) had last quarter issued a directive to three GSM operators including Glo Mobile, MTN and Celtel, for offering below the average quality of service based on Key Performance Indicator (KPI) to pay compensation of N175 (US$1.6) per subscriber of over 10 million affected.

Attempts by two GSM operators, MTN and Celtel to evade the payment of compensation to subscribers have been thwarted. The two GSM operators had approached the court, requesting for an interlocutory injunction to restrain the Commission from implementing its earlier direction, upon which it recently directed the two operators to pay US$1.6 per subscriber for the month ended January 2008.

The court upheld that the Plaintiffs/Applicants had not shown special circumstances to grant the relief being sought from the court, and therefore, dismissed the application. The NCC had on January 9, 2008, won the case earlier instituted against it by the two operators who protested against the notices on payment of compensation to subscribers issued to them on 19th and 20th September 2007. Following the ruling of the court in favour of the NCC the 9th of January 2008, the Commission on February 28, 2008, finally issued a direction to both operators to pay compensation of US$1.6 per subscriber for the month ended January 31, 2008.

The Commission said the two operators failed to meet the requirement to achieve Traffic Channel Congestion (TCH), below 10 per cent levels for the month of January 2008, in line with the Key Performance Indicators published by it, and issued to the operators late last year. It further directed the operators to pay all its active subscribers for the effective month by way of airtime credit and that no time limitation shall be placed by the operator on the utilization of the airtime credit. All the active subscribers are to be credited between March 1, 2008 and April 15, 2008.

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