The Nigerian telecommunications industry is fraught with challenges that have become a litmus test for the telecoms industry regulator, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), to tackle.
Prominent among the challenges are the interconnect debt issues among telecoms operators and the over N200 billion Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) debt owed telecoms operators by Deposit Money Banks (DMBs).
Both challenges have lingered for so long and they are already affecting telecoms operations across networks as well as the telecoms subscribers.
Disturbed by the prolonged challenges and their negative impacts on telecommunications service offerings, NCC has identified the challenges as key priorities for immediate resolution.
THISDAY said that NCC has addressed the interconnect debt issues to an appreciable end, and has commenced fresh moves to also address the controversial USSD debt that has been alleged to have accumulated to over N200 billion as at October 2024.
According to its insider source, the NCC called all parties involved in the interconnect debt issues to a meeting, where the debts were reviewed and resolved and immediate decision was taken for the payment of all outstanding interconnect debts owed by different telecoms operators. “All outstanding interconnect debts had since been cleared,” the source said.
nterconnect debt is the accumulation of stipulated amount of money recorded over a period of time for all telecoms calls that were generated from one network and terminated on another network. Although telecoms operators were supposed to reconcile the amount of calls that were generated and terminated on each other’s networks, but some operators deliberately allowed the stipulated amount to accumulate without off-setting the bills, a development that led to the accumulation of huge interconnect debts that ran into billions of naira before it was addressed.
After successfully resolving the interconnect imbroglio, the customer-centric regulator is currently addressing the USSD debt, with all intents and purposes to also reach amicable conclusion.
