The problems of mobile networks congestion in Nigeria : The quality of mobile calls after a decade that 2G became commercially available in Nigeria is still very disturbing. You may wake up some days and find that there is no signal in your phone.

This observation could remain for a couple of days. Your phone may be working in the morning, but for two or three hours in the afternoon you may not be able to make calls.

An operator’s service may be good in a large city such as Lagos or Abuja, but the same operator’s service may be in shambles in another smaller city, such as Yola or Yobe. Some of my students in Yola complained so bitterly about the poor quality of service, particularly of the big operators.

So, I told them that we could actually carry out a performance evaluation of the operators’ network similar to the one I did in Lagos in 2005.

The students took the challenge and we decided to research the performance of the operators’ services in Lagos, Abuja and Yola.

The results show that all the operators are very congested, which is why one would have to call several times on some occasions for a call to go through. In this paper we present only the findings for Lagos.

After ten years of mobile services in Nigeria, many users are still finding it difficult to make calls at times. Some of them carry two or three phones to ensure they can be reached at all times. I was in a professional meeting in Abuja and I asked my colleagues how many mobile phones they were carrying and only two out of 101 people have only one phone in the audience.

That represents less than 2% of the audience. In other words, more than 98% of the audience carried two or more phones and after a decade it would seem preposterous that this is still the case.

In Europe and America people carry one phone that serves their private and commercial needs always. At this stage it is shameful that we still carry more than one, but most importantly will we ever come out of this quagmire? Will a Nigerian phone user ever have one phone that would meet the necessary quality desired by a user any time of day, seven days a week, etc? Of course, it is possible to have one mobile phone as users in US or UK would, but the way operators in Nigeria are currently managed by the industry regulator has to change drastically.

The operators are not currently properly managed and until we face this reality, we would find it difficult to get very good quality from any of the operators and hence we shall continue to carry more than one phone. In this paper we compare the test results obtained for Lagos in 2005 and those obtained in 2011.

The observations from the comparison should be of concern to telecommunications professionals and to those managing the industry. We shall now discuss the research methodology. Next, we analyse the research results. Finally, we discuss our observations and conclusions.

Research Methodology

The number of calls made during the course of this research for 2011 are 35,816 for Lagos; 15,102 for Abuja and 21,416 for Yola.

In other words the calls to, through and between the different 2G networks during the course of this research were over 72,334 calls. The research was carried out for a period of six days: 12th through 17th of March 2011. Specifically, the research was conducted on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday in order to capture the peculiar behaviour of the users during weekends, beginning of the week and midweek. The test calls were also divided to account for morning, afternoon and evening callers’ behaviour.

The test calls were carried out with 10 primary new phones in Lagos; 10 in Abuja and 8 in Yola. Two phones for each of the operators: Airtel, MTN, GLO, Etisalat and Visafone. One of the phones is used for calling and the second for receiving.

All the calling phones in each location are of the same make and model. Two students conducted the research in each location with the supervision of Prof. Odinma. The two students for Lagos location are Emmanuel Chukwudozie and Joshua Showulu; Jude and Riwan for Abuja; Kadija Manase and Iniabong for Yola.

The choice of site was critical to this research. The test site must of necessity be in an area where none of the operators networks have weak signal during the research period. The Lagos test calls were conducted at Knightsbridge Hotel; Abuja test calls were carried out at Sheraton Hotel and Yola test calls were at Girei Suites.

Analyses of Result

The two test phones for each operator are place uninhibited on a desk in the test room.

Both phones are therefore registered with the same Base station subsystem. So, near perfect results were expected because this test scenario was the Least Common Denominator of faulty expectancy. Results from test calls between two phones in different base stations or switching centres should produce more challenging outcomes.

Rural area calls would even be more challenging. So, it should be noted that based on the test scenario chosen, a call failure of more than 1% represents a serious congested network and it is therefore unacceptable.

There are a total of 70 tables of report showing the different facets of test runs. Only eight of the tables have been graphed and presented here.

Any one or operator curious about the distribution of the test calls is welcomed to have access to the overall information and possibly additional detailed analysis/report from the author for a fee.

We tested for the Connectivity and Interconnectivity and used the observed outcomes to reach certain conclusions about how congested the mobile networks are and also assess the ability of a network to interconnect with other operators’ network.

Connectivity Test

Connectivity test investigates the internal behaviour of a particular operators’ network. In the Figures 1 through 6, the test results of percentage failures for each day for Morning, Afternoon and Evening are given for 2005 and 2011 observations.

The six figures show that all the operators’ networks, except MTN were internally congested in 2005, but all networks were internally congested in March 2011, when the test was carried out. This statistically means that one would require several trials at times to get a call through. This is unacceptable.

InterConnectivity Test

Inter-Connectivity measures the ability of one operator to interconnect with the other operators. In figure 7 and 8, the charts for the test results of percentage failures are presented.

We observe that all the operators’ networks are heavily congested with respect to their ability to interconnect with subscribers from other operators. Overall, Etisalat seem to do a better job of interconnecting with other networks in 2011, followed by GLO network, which also ranked highest in 2005.

Observations

It is to be noted that in 2005, Vmobile, now Aitel had very high percentage failures during the research week because of a promotion, which enabled road-side call centres to offer much reduced call charges.

At the time, private users could hardly make calls because the road-side resellers had more customers than the network could cope with. The cheap calls made every subscriber to use the road-side Vmobile resellers to make there calls and this inundated the Vmobile network.

So, the Vmobile result for 2005 should be read with this in mind. Looking at the morning intra-connectivity test results displayed in the Figure 1 and 2. Apart from the observation for Vmobile, in figure 1, we observe that GLO had the next highest connectivity failures of 12%, ignoring MTEL from the figure. In figure 2, which is for 2011 test runs, GLO had about that number of failures also for Wednesday (Day5). In that same figure, MTN had 24% failures for Tuesday (Day 4), though this may appear to be unusual, but MTN has more failures in the morning of 2011.

If one was to conclude that the effects of the very high percentage failures for Vmobile (Airtel) was caused by promotion, but in the 2011 test runs for Lagos, Aitel has failures amounting to more than 6% and this is not acceptable.

On the other hand, in the afternoon test runs of Figures 3 and 4, respectively for 2005 and 2011, it can be observed that MTN and GLO recorded more failures in most of the days the test took place for 2011. This same observation was made for the evening test results (figures 5 and 6). This implies that the connectivity test show that the operators’ networks are still heavily congested today and in some cases, worst than it was in 2005.

This observation is a little bit different for the interconnectivity test results. It can be observed from figures 7 and 8 that there are significant improvements in interconnectivity from 2005 to 2011. However, the observed values for 2011 still show that more work still has to be done in order to have the networks interconnect seamlessly.

Conclusion

This paper presented a research conducted to study the behaviour of the top operators in Nigeria. Over 42,000 calls were made during the days of the studies in order to ascertain the reliability of the networks.

The studies examined different times of the day and different days of the week in order to capture the behavioural pattern of users. Ikeja was chosen for this research because all the operators have consistently full signal and the same location enabled us to compare the same Base Station subsystem in 2005 and 2011.

This area was also chosen such that there should be no fault at all during the course of the research. So, in the wisdom and experience of the author, any failure of above 1% represents serious congestions of the network.

Any network that is congested in this our test scenario would pose a serious problem to rural area and calls between two distant users.

The intra-network and inter-network connectivity were a major focus of this research. We took the liberty of comparing test outcomes in Lagos for 2005 and 2011. Sadly, for the intra-connectivity, which tests for the internal behaviour and congestion of a particular operators’ network, we found that all the networks are as congested today as in 2005 and in most cases more congested in 2011.

The interconnectivity tests show improvements in the ability of one operator to interconnect with another from 2005 to 2011, but again the congestions are still very high.

The research, therefore, finds that the operators’ networks are seriously congested! If the congestion were not properly checked, it would become chaotic in the future as the teledensity increases.

It is now over ten years since 2G was first launched in Nigeria and it is mind-boggling that mobile networks are still very congested.

This is obviously due to improper planning on the part of the operators and policing of the operators by the industry regulator, NCC.

It is my contention that if the current state of congestion in the mobile networks is left unchecked, the telephone services can only become erratic and chaotic, which would have far-reaching consequences for the future of telephone service in the country.

lOdinma is Professor of Telecommunications and IT, American University of Nigeria, Yola, and was formerly Head of Network Solutions (Europe, Middle East & Africa), Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs), and also former Senior Technical Manager, AT&T, NJ, USA.
The problems of mobile networks congestion in Nigeria.