Business News of Wednesday, 4 December 2019
Source: citinewsroom.com
2019-12-04
Joe Anokye, Director General of NCA
The National Communications Authority, NCA, has written to Ghana’s largest Mobile Network, MTN; to explain to them the challenges that led to the high data charges among others; and also ensure a refund to customers and compensate them as well.
“National Telecommunications regulator, the National Communications Authority (NCA) has directed mobile network operator, MTN Ghana to ensure the immediate resolution of the challenges with their billing system. MTN has further been directed to refund all losses suffered by affected consumers” part of the statement said.
Customers of the country’s largest mobile network operator over the past two days were unable to buy data from their mobile money wallet while some saw a drastic reduction in the volume of data bundles purchased.
The regulator says it had been inundated with complaints across its complaints platform by consumers on the MTN network over what they believed to be wrongful billing. The incidence which started on Sunday December 1, continued through Monday December 2. In addition to this, some calls to MTN’s call centres were unsuccessful.
It added that, although MTN informed consumers later on of the challenges they were facing, they failed to inform the Authority.
The Regulator has thus ordered MTN to submit a detailed report on the incident to be sent to its offices by close of business Wednesday December 4, failure to which the appropriate sanctions will be applied.
It says the report should include an explanation why the Authority was not informed of this challenge, the full nature of the issue, the impact of the challenge on MTN’s customers and remedial measures amongst others.
The NCA assured the general public that the needed measures will be implemented to avoid a recurrence of the challenges.
On the compensation, the NCA says MTN must inform affected consumers of the package prior to its implementation.
MTN to compensate customers over data bundle challenges
Prior to this statement however, the Chief Executive Officer of MTN Selorm Adadevoh, had announced that the company had fixed the challenges customers faced relating to the purchase of data bundles.
Mr. Adadevoh, speaking at a press conference in Accra, said what happened could be blamed on technical hitches in the implementation of new tariffs.
He added that the technical challenges have been fixed and affected customers would be compensated starting Tuesday evening.
“We have tried to resolve the issues associated with MoMo purchases and customers who made purchases and did not receive the data bundles have been refunded. We have also looked at the challenges with the MoMo functionality itself and the issue has been resolved. So, today if you go into the MoMo menu to buy a data bundle, that transaction should complete.”
“What we are also doing tonight is to reimplement what we had intended, and you should see some correction to data volumes tomorrow [Wednesday]. Customers should get the level of value that they were expecting, that implementation will happen tonight [Tuesday]. There are very specific bundles that customers have requested we bring back; the 3 cedi and the 10 cedi bundles are the two biggest ones that will be reintroduced tonight[Tuesday],” he stated.
He added that effective 6:00pm on December 3, customers who had made purchases during the period of transition would be compensated with data that commensurate with purchases they made.
