Telecom Quality of Service

The State of Uganda's Telecom Quality of Service (QoS) As more and more Ugandans become avid users of mobile phones and the telecommunications industry becomes more competitive, one is led to think that all is good for the end user consumers. However, end users are not getting the value for their money from the providers, especially when it comes to the quality of services delivered. Quality of Service can be understood as a series of network traffic engineering mechanisms, where resource reservation and control systems are implemented by the operators, the outcome being the quality of services rendered to the users. But many people have often complained about their providers, indicating that specific pointers of quality for voice and data services are trampled upon by providers. What we get more often from the providers are ambitious campaigns to acquire more subscribers, which would be a good thing if these were necessarily equally balanced with improvements in the capacity or bandwidth in their network infrastructure. This leads to overloading the network and clogging service delivery, with symptoms like SMS and other phone transactions hanging in cyberspace for long hours or even delivery failure.  This can be frustrating to people and businesses who depend on these communication channels for operations. Capacity is the resource for telecoms - all communications products and services are tailored around it. But it seems to be taking the back stage when it comes to considerations. What use is a wide customer base acquired at the cost of service quality? In the recently concluded technology event byGoogle at Speke Resort Munyonyo, software engineers highlighted that more than 45% of access to information in Africa happens on the mobile phone. This means that the mobile phone is in fact an important platform both for access to information by common people and delivery of technology solutions in form of applications by technology entrepreneurs. We cannot reap these benefits when we’re still reckoning with broken calls, delays, jitters and bit-rate errors when we make calls or send messages. The Communications Commission needs to provide tough leadership in order to protect mobile phone users as well as prepare the ground for the next phase of mobile platform technologies. The telecoms may not regulate themselves from profit making drives, but since most of these network providers have standards-based infrastructures, it is possible for the commission to determine throughputs on the provider communication links, and save us from these performance ills. This benefits everyone.