The regulators of Senegal and Mauritania have both issued warnings to their respective nation’s operators over subpar Quality of Service (QoS).
Senegal’s ARTP (Regulation Authority for Telecoms and Post) formalised its response after discovering “failings which negatively impact the electronic communications sector and cause enormous disruption to consumers” during its recent network quality assessment.
The country’s three major operators Expresso, Free and Orange have been granted 30 days to bring their networks up to standard, in accordance with Article 177 of Senegal’s Code of Electronic Communications. If their voice and data services do not meet requirements after this time, they could be hit with sanctions.
In Mauritania meanwhile, the punishments were more severe due to the severity of the offence. The ARE (Autorite de Regulation) has handed out fines of MRU95 million (USD2.5 million) to the country’s operators after they let their QoS levels slip.
Chinguitel received the smallest fine of MRU6 million, but rival operators Mattel and Mauritel were issued charges of MRU27.3 million and MRU62 million respectively.
These penalties mark the second time this year that the regulator has issued fines over QoS, having previously handed over a total of MRU143.7 million.
