As the stakeholders’ meeting on the determination of the Mobile Termination Rate (MTR) was holding in Lagos last week, there were some unpleasant developments happening across some telecommunications networks which, at once, underlined one of the major reasons for such a meeting. Engr. Gbenga Adebayo, ALTON President, told this writer that that very morning of June 16 he had received several messages on a WhatsApp platform concerning vandalisation of telecommunications facilities across the country. Another source, who confirmed the ugly occurrence, said he shared the same platform, and there is vandalisation on the networks or theft of one item or the other every hour, a development that is alarming and needs to be given urgent attention.
Adebayo said the MTR meeting was urgently needed to address developments in the industry, some of them residual and others quite fresh, all combining to put pressure on the industry including some latent disfunctions that some people could normalise ignorantly. The Mobile Termination Rate (MTR) is the wholesale charge one network pays another when its customer places a call that is received on a different network. It is the underlying pricing mechanism that connects every Nigerian mobile subscriber — regardless of their network — with every other. The current rate stands at N3.90/N4.70 per minute. The rate remains in the public domain to help those in the ecosystem — operators and subscribers — understand their commitment to each other. Quite understandably, there was a buzz following the meeting that the regulator was about to increase telecom tariffs. This is to be expected because in a country where truth has fallen victim to politricks, cynicism becomes the cheapest product in the open space. MTR determination goes beyond pricing; it is a consideration of so many intervening variables and elements to arrive at a determination that is fair to all in the ecosystem.
