Minister of Communication, Dr. Edward Omane Boamah has said government would not hesitate to enforce a domestic roaming policy as a solution to the coverage gaps and generally poor quality of telecoms service in the country. Telecom operators in Ghana do have international roaming agreements with other telecom operators in other countries but they do not have similar arrangements with each other locally. As a result, if a customer on one network went to a location where his/her service provider has no coverage, he/she is unable to get service until he/she moves to where the service provider has coverage. But domestic roaming would mean, for instance, that when a customer of Vodafone goes to a location where Vodafone does not have coverage but MTN has coverage, then MTN would provide service to the Vodafone customer for a fee from Vodafone, just like they all do with their international roaming partners. Domestic roaming happens in some of the developed markets, and the Minister of Communication said he is considering it for Ghana as an option to deal with the coverage gaps and challenges customers face. Speaking at the International Telecoms Union’s (ITU) 30th Quality of Service Development Group (QSDG) meeting in Accra, Dr. Omane Boamah said “we will not hesitate to implement a domestic roaming policy as a measure to ensure that all Ghanaians have telephony service anywhere they find themselves in the country.” The telecom operators in Ghana have, for years, been co-locating and sharing infrastructure to widen their coverage across the country, but some telcos are still unable t provide service to customers in certain locations within the country because of lack of coverage. The Minister believes domestic roaming would allow customers of the various networks to enjoy coverage anywhere they find themselves, even if their original service provider has no coverage in some areas. Dr. Omane Boamah is also encouraging the telcos to take advantage of the government’s LTE (4G) deployment to improve on the quality of their telephony service and coverage. He also urged the industry regulator, National Communication Authority (NCA) to upgrade its QoS monitoring equipment to be up to speed with the upgrades that the telcos would be doing to LTE and other higher technology. In response to that, Principal Manager at the NCA, Kwame Baah-Acheamfuor told ADOMBUSINESS the NCA would is upgrading regularly and would intensify its QoS monitoring by going from the regional level to specific locations to ensure that QoS thresholds are met to the minutest level across the country. He said the QSDG meeting in Accra was necessary because it seeks to find ways to take QoS beyond meeting regulatory standards to actually addressing specific challenges facing customers with the view to improving customer experience. Deputy Director-General of the NCA, Albert Enninful urged the participants at the meeting to fish out the impact of network fraud and security, SIM registration, technology convergence, digital migration and social media on general quality of service in the telecoms sector. The NCA had always maintained that SIM registration, for instance, enables telcos to know the profile of their customers in particular areas and therefore enable them to install specific infrastructure to meet the consumption level of those set of customers. And digital migration would free bandwidth from the television sector to help telcos expand and provide better services. On the other hand, network fraud, such as SIM Boxing creates congestion on networks because one SIM Box contains either hundreds or thousands of SIM cards routing international calls at the same time and that makes it difficult for individual genuine customers to get their call through. Other fraudulent international gateway practices such as routing calls through unapproved routes to evade tax, also affect quality of service because the calls go through extra equipment, which potentially affects sound quality. Chief Executive of Telecom Chamber, hosts of the QSDG Meeting, Kwaku Sakyi-Addo observed that as the mobile phone turned 40 this year, Ghana’s mobile penetration also reached 100%, and that meant that regulatory environment in Ghana needed to be nurturing enough to encourage the necessary investment necessary to provide the needed bandwidth to ensure high quality of service.