Nigeria’s four major telecommunications companies MTN, Airtel, Glo and 9Mobile have a combined total of 267 tariff plans. This emerged from a Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) investigation into subscriber complaints over data shortages. According to the commission, these plans are primarily focused on promotions on platforms to attract and retain customers.
Director of Public Relations, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), Dr. Ikechukwu Adinde, who analysed the NCC findings at an event in Lagos, said MTN alone accounted for the majority of the total with 159 plans. These include 14 for voice and 145 for data.
Airtel, the second largest telecommunications provider in Nigeria, offers 27 plans for voice services and 41 plans for data services, taking the total number of plans to 68. Globacom offers six voice plans and 32 data plans while 9mobile offers seven different voice plans and 97 data plans.
Dr. Adinde in his analysis said the majority of telecom subscribers do not know the actual tariffs offered by their network providers. Thus, the multitude of tariffs gives them headaches and they face the dilemma of which tariff to choose to get the most for their money.
The Director noted that these tariffs are usually so similar that subscribers cannot distinguish between them. This made it difficult for many of these subscribers to choose the best plan for them.
Therefore, according to Adinde, in order to understand consumers better and improve the quality of use, the Commission will streamline the various plans and reduce them to just seven.
“The whole idea is to ensure that consumers have a good experience, because too many tariff plans affect the quality of service – all benefits or allowances, voice, SMS and data must be seated in clear, useful and user friendly formats,” he said.
The Director-General stressed transparency, claiming that the currently available tariff plans do not provide the transparency that many users crave.
“I was able to state how much this time you use per session. Every time you use maybe five minutes on YouTube, two minutes of maybe Netflix, three minutes of Facebook experience, and all of that,” he said.”
“We intend to do this right. As part of this simplification rule, approved minutes are considered for all data sets, so when you visit our website, you will see different tiers of voice and data rate plans.”
