Telcos Renew Push for OTT Regulation

• Telcos Renew Push for OTT Regulation

Nigeria telecoms operators have renewed the push to get the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to regulate the activities of Over-The-Top (OTT) players.

The carriers, including MTN, Globacom, Airtel, 9mobile and others, acting under the aegis of Association of Licensed Telecoms Companies of Nigeria (ALTON), said the time has come for the regulator to re-examine its position on issuing technology neutral licences because of emerging issues in the industry.

Its Chairman, Gbenga Adebayo, lamented the high mortality rate of telcos. He said the number of operators has dipped by half over the past years because of issues that are not entirely their making.

What is OTT?

Online knowledge bank, Wikipedia, explains that “OTT is where a telecoms service provider delivers one or more services across an IP (internet protocol) network. “The IP networks is predominantly the public internet, although sometimes telco-run cloud services delivered via a corporation’s existing IP-VPN (virtual private network) from another provider, as opposed to the carrier’s own access network. It embraces a variety of telco services including communications (e.g. voice and messaging), content (e.g. TV and music) and cloud-based (e.g. compute and storage) offerings.”

It said stimulated by the availability of high performance fixed and mobile broadband networks as well as the rapid adoption of smartphones and tablets, telco-OTT is viewed by a selection of industry analysts and media commentators as the mechanism that mobile network operators need to employ in order to compete with the vast and growing range of over-the-top (OTT) services provided by non-telco companies.

Telco-OTT is a response to the fact that users will have multiple devices (smartphones, laptops or other connected devices such as TVs, games consoles) which almost inevitably will have various different access providers (especially with the growth of public-access Wi-Fi).

According to Wikipedia, to deliver consistent telco-branded services, at some points at least, they will need to be delivered over third-party access, Wikipedia submitted.

ALTON’s position

Adebayo said the regulator has said continuously that it is neutral about technology. This, in essence, means it licences for services and not for technology.

He said today, the reality is that technology is driving the market. It is no longer services. There is a need for the regulator to begin to look at the issue of regulating technology and not services.

For example, OTT as it is called, the likes of YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, BlackBerry Messenger and others, all of these are OTT and not part of the core services for which operators are licensed.

“Those kinds of services have a social implication, economic implication, security implication and if they are not licensed, that means they are not regulated and if they are not regulated, there is no limit or scope to what they can do. And no control over their services and content they can provide.

“We are therefore saying there is a need for the regulator to begin to look away from the neutrality of technology and technology certification and regulation than just licensing for service not only because of the social security implication but also because of the economic implication for the operators.

“Today, more people send WhatsApp messages, they send messages over the social media platforms than they do on the conventional SMS platform.

“Operators have been licensed to provide voice, SMS and data services for which they are licensed and being charged annual operating levy. OTT don’t have such and there is even loss of revenue to the regulator of the country too because they are not paying for rendering those services.

“That is why we are saying that our regulator must begin to look away from technology neutrality but Health of the telecoms industry.

He said studies and report had shown that in a market such as Nigeria’s, bigger operators survive better than smaller operators.

“When I took up this role as the Chairman of ALTON, there were 35 companies in our group. Today we are 16, meaning that we have lost half of our members due to problems not of their own making,” he lamented.

He said this might be forces of competition, this might be forces of market forces, the challenges of investing, it might be access to fund, it might be anti-competitive prices of on the part of some of the big players.

“We just think that studies such as the Study of the Level of Competiton in the Telecoms Industry in Nigeria organised by the NCC should dwell into those areas so that we begin to see the issues leading to the death of telecoms companies.

“The challenge we have now with one of the big operators attests to the fact that the industry may not be as healthy as we are thinking and therefore studies such as this are very important first as health check, to see where we are and to see where and how we can further adjust and tune things for a more competitive industry and for a more robust market and for the greater interest of the consumers,” Adebayo said.