Factors Affecting the Quality of Network Services in Emerging Telecoms Operating Environment and Markets

As an emerging market, the telecoms sector in Nigeria has undergone a considerable increase in teledensity and consumer base over a decade and is still on exponential growth. However, the consequence of this growth has been a continuous degradation of telecom operators’ network quality of service (QoS), which has impacted subscribers’ and customers’ needs, satisfaction, and expectations. Given the existing literature and research on asset management, this paper explores the roles of infrastructure and asset management activities in network service quality in the study context. Therefore, in exploring the QoS issues, the infrastructure and asset intermittent outages have been critical factors from a performance perspective. In addition, operating cost (OPEX) and risk were also factors from the management and operational domain. The paper uses a survey strategy, focusing on a single case study of Nigeria’s telecommunication operating environment, with a mixed method of quantitative and qualitative techniques and a systematic review of related literature and documents on telecommunications and asset management. The chosen participants are field operations technicians and managers from the network operators, managed service companies and regulatory agencies. Data were collected through a designed online structured questionnaire and semi-structured face-to-face interviews and analysed through gap analysis protocol. Despite significant growth in telecommunication in the study area, the results indicated an impact of infrastructure and asset outages on critical issues: QoS network performance, cost pressure, and risk. The key identified factors affecting the network’s quality from the infrastructure and assets perspective are poor diesel management with 47.50% lack of actual diesel consumption measurement and visibility, and the outages caused by poor maintenance and monitoring practices at 15.70%. Real-time fault escalation increase mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). These infrastructures and asset problems, in turn, affect the QoS, which is a critical component of network availability. Addressing the power outages caused by poor diesel management to reduce MTTR is essential in resolving the cooling system’s 15.30% failures. These findings recognised the challenges subscribers and network operators face in an emerging operating environment and markets due to deficiencies in public grid infrastructures and systematised maintenance culture. This explains why network operators should focus on deploying intelligent and predictive approaches toward managing their infrastructure and assets. Furthermore, this recommended intelligent and predictive system integrates with human-centric intervention in addressing QoS issues.