The 30-day ultimatum given to the country's two largest mobile service providers, MTN and Onetouch Limited by the National Communications Authority to improve on their quality of service expired last week Thursday with little improvements in the services of the two mobile operators. Additionally, the companies failed to halt new access line activations within the stipulated period. The NCA insists operators, who will dare to defy the directives to clean up their acts within the given thirty days will be severely sanctioned. However, information gathered by B&FT indicates that consumers were still able to subscribe to the two networks without any difficulty. As such, consumers are anxious to see if the NCA would be bold enough to apply the sanctions it promised consumers especially when mobile phone services are deteriorating. The NCA says since the embargo the Authority has monitored the market conditions and it is pleased with the ongoing negotiations between MTN and Onetouch to address various interconnect capacity. "The two companies are cooperating at the highest levels of their various organizations to ensure that capacity enhancing links wherever possible within the set time scales are in place to address the congestion challenges that compelled the Authority to issue the directives," the NCA has said. In issuing the directives, the NCA explained that these were some of the measures being undertaken to monitor and evaluate the performance of the country's telecom service providers in a bid to improve performance, following a wave of complaints from users. Earlier last month, the NCA directed MTN and Onetouch to bar new subscribers from hooking onto their networks until their admission that inadequate infrastructure it inherited from Investcom are responsible for the poor reception being experienced by the company's subscribers. "Setting up additional cell sites alone to bridge the infrastructure gap to improve service delivery would take more than 30 days. In response to the NCA assessment on the quality of service in the mobile industry, the Ghana Telecom issued a statement expressing its disappointment and shock at the Authorities directives. "Onetouch is not in violation of the Key Performance Indicators that govern its operations. We therefore are disappointed in the NCA," it said. The Director-General of the NCA, Bernard Forson Jr. since issuing the directives has not minced words with the operators when he called their bluff saying, "They can test us." Source: B&FT