In the period September to November 2019, UCC conducted benchmark measurements of mobile voice telephony and data services in Uganda to assess the Quality of Service (QoS) received by users/consumers of these services. The operators whose services were considered under this exercise were Uganda Telecom Limited (UTL), MTN Uganda Limited, Airtel Uganda Limited and Africell Uganda Limited.
The measurements were carried out from the end user perspective in twenty (20) towns across the country namely; Mbarara, Kabale, Moroto, Kasese, Hoima, Mubende, Arua, Mbale, Tororo, Soroti, Lira, Kampala, Mukono, Jinja, Masaka, Mityana, Entebbe, Masindi, Fort Portal and Gulu. However, UTL network was not accessible in seven [7] of the towns considered.
From the results, Africell’s drop call rate was above UCC‘s set 2% threshold in 7 out of the 20 towns. Airtel registered 6 towns with poor drop call rate, while MTN and UTL came out on top with 3 out of 20 outs registering high drop call rate. A dropped call is a call that is successfully established but is terminated by the operator’s network prior to normal termination by the user and without the user’s action.
When asked how they plan to improve the status quo, Africell — through their twitter account said that they are working rigorously to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future.
However in Kampala, Africell Uganda had the lowest drop call rate followed by UTL, Airtel and MTN which registered the worst call drop rate.
Other QoS standards that were measured by UCC in the exercise included; Blocked call rate which indicates maximum proportion of call attempts on the network that should be blocked with a threshold of 2% and Success call rate which represents a minimum proportion of calls attempts on the network that should be successful at a threshold of 98%.
From the results, Airtel had an overall worst blocked call rate in cities like Lira, Jinja, Mbale, Moroto and Entebbe out of the other 20 towns. Africell performed that best in this category and it seemed to be the reverse when it came to call success rate in Mityana where the company scored about 89% out the 98% UCC threshold.
Causes of degradation in QoS
According to UCC, these are typically associated with inadequate performance:
- of the communications network
- of the terminal equipment/end user infrastructure (e.g. poor quality or faulty user phone, faulty or poor set up of the local area network, etc.), or
- a combination of both.
The common causes of inadequate or degraded performance of a communication network include:
- Inadequate coverage (resulting in a network signal that is too weak for the user’s phone to connect to the network),
- An outage of a component of a network (due to power outage, fibre cuts/theft/vandalism, and software or hardware/equipment problems/failure)
- Interference (either within the network or with other radio users),
- Inadequate network design causing failure to handover a call from one cell to another and
- congestion,
Major causes of unsuccessful call attempts
- Poor network coverage: Areas where there is no signal or the signal strength/level is too low for a phone to connect to the mobile network.
- Poor signal quality: Degradation in the quality of the network signal due to interference to the radio signal majorly emanating from another radio in the same network using the same frequency or due to other radio systems in the area.
- Inadequacies in network planning: Loss of connection while moving from one serving network cell (tower or base station) to another.
- Congestion
In summary, the results presented by UCC can be affected by many other things like places where coverage is said to exist, there are shortfalls in terms of gaps in the coverage and optimisation of the networks.
The regular has engaged the operators for justification for the findings of the exercise and remedial plans have been agreed to address the short falls in performance.
 here are th){kind=link}