Government officials have expressed disgust about the poor quality of service provided by telecom operators in the country - as telecom regulators of the continent assembled in Accra to discuss ways of bridging ICT-related standards. The Vice-President, John Mahama - at the opening of an African telecom regulators forum on how to implement resolutions that are of interest to the region as agreed at the World Telecommunication Standardisation Assembly (WTSA) in October last year - implored the national telecom regulator to implement stringent measures to improve the poor network services provided to consumers of telecom services. "Some of the service quality is outrageous and government will not allow that to continue," he said. He added that government will assist the national regulator, National Communication Authority (NCA), to implement a strict monitoring policy on the telecom sector to protect the interest of consumers. The vice-president's comments follows the recent wave of complaints from mobile phone subscribers resulting from continued call drops, cross-calls, speech mutation, and wrong voice prompts among others. The Minister of Communications, Haruna Iddrisu, who said he recently had his call dropped while on the phone with the Director-General of the NCA, added that government was unhappy with the quality of services provided by telecom operators. He further expressed government's outrage at the indiscriminate siting of telecom masts, which he said poses health and environmental threats to residents in the country. However, some of the telecom operators said the siting of masts is necessary to improving the quality of services. A senior official of the NCA who spoke to B&FT on condition of anonymity, said the issue of quality service was not, just about the regulator moving to sanction operators whose performance falls below the required standards. "The issue needs to be tackled holistically - from the equipment manufacturer to the operator - to ensure that telecom equipment brought into the country conforms to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standards, and that is why we have assembled here. "So it is not about the NCA going to the operator to say improve on your service, " he said. In October 2007, the provision of poor quality services forced the NCA to direct the country's two largest mobile service providers, MTN and Onetouch Limited (Vodafone), to halt new access line activations until their networks were appropriately dimensioned to take on additional capacity - within 30 days, which the operators failed to meet. Currently, there are six mobile phone operators in the country with a combined market share - of about 11. 5 million subscribers, according to statistics released by the NCA. Vodafone Ghana and Zain Ghana are the only fixed-line network operators. Zain, which also operates mobile network services, as well as Nigerian-based Globacom PIc, has outlined various strategies to woo subscribers to their networks through quality service provision, value-added services, and other aggressive marketing strategies. Source: B&FT