By Gad Masereka
Kampala: Airtel Uganda has refuted charges by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) over allegations of frauding its customers with a 4G internet service.
On 22 July, UCC gave Airtel Uganda Limited less than Fourteen (14) days to Show cause why regulatory sanctions should not be instituted against the telecom for misrepresenting to its customers and the general public about its network quality and speeds.
According
to UCC investigations across the country towns and customers complaints, the
commission came out to notice that Airtel claims weren’t accurate and true.
“Following primarily investigations conducted in the towns of Kampala, Jinja,
Mukono, Entebbe and Jinja to establish the level of coverage and download
throughput of Airtel’s 4G network the commission found out whereas Airtel’s LTE
signal was available in over 90% of the areas sampled the networks speed are
much lower than what is internationally expected for a 4G internet service,”
reads part of the statement.
Airtel Uganda Limited Managing Director VG Somasekhar while addressing Journalists on 24 July said, the charges are unfair based on a misunderstanding. “All one needs is to have a 4G smart phone, 4G Airtel line, the appropriate settings on their smartphone and lastly put the Airtel line in the first slot of the phone in case of a dual simcard. The public just needs to be educated on the matter of how they can fully access the 4G network,” He said.
The company also unveiled its plans of installing more 200 Airtel sites all over the country.
“These are expected to increase the public experience as they use airtel services in areas where they have no full coverage,” Somasekhar explained.
These changes include..
- Introducing 4 by 4 MIMO for the first time in Uganda. This is essentially 4 streams of data for transmission and receiving pathways which means MIMO has greatly enhanced 4G speeds of data.
- Carrier Aggregation which is a technology that combines two or more carriers into one data channel to enhance the data capacity. Carrier Aggregation has been used for the spectrum efficiency and speed so users can experience incredibly faster download and upload speeds that bring with them high resolution videos that can stream with minimum buffering.
- Spectrum reframing which refers to recovery of a part of spectrum from one technology for use by another technology without impacting the services of the donor technology. This has ensured an optimized mix to serve both voice quality and improve data speeds
- Fiber expansion which is a transmission technology that uses light to transmit data. This technology provides data speeds in excess of 1Gbps which improves speed and latency of data speeds.
