The Director-General of the National Communications Authority (NCA), Ing. Edmund Yirenkyi Fianko, has publicly detailed for the first time how the regulator will enforce its tough new call quality rules, revealing that operators will be tested across three consecutive days in specific locations before sanctions are triggered.
Speaking to Bernard Avle on Channel One TV’s The Point of View programme on Monday, Fianko explained that the NCA’s enforcement process would begin with a formal notice requiring operators to fix identified problems, not an immediate fine, but that persistent failures would escalate toward financial penalties sanctioned through the Electronic Communications Tribunal (ECT).
“Our first action is not to fine; our first action is to bring it to your attention and give you time to remedy it,” he said.
The NCA’s revised Quality of Service (QoS) standards, which took effect on February 15, 2026, cut the maximum allowable call drop rate from 3 per cent to below 1 per cent, replacing benchmarks that had been in place since 2004. The new framework also mandates a Call Connection Success Rate (CCSR) above 95 per cent in over 90 per cent of operational cells within any Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assembly (MMDA) nationwide.
Fianko said the NCA would conduct repeat field measurements at the same location over three days to distinguish a network blip from a structural problem before proceeding with sanctions.
“If we go back to the location and test again for three days and you fail, it means that it’s not just a snapshot; it’s a consistent issue in that locality,” he said.
He acknowledged that fines are embedded in operator licences but cautioned that financial penalties alone do not solve the problem for subscribers.
“If we fine them, the money comes to us, but it doesn’t help the consumer,” Fianko said, adding that the primary objective remains forcing network improvement rather than generating penalty revenue.
The remarks come three weeks after the NCA introduced the new standards and indicated that fines for historical quality breaches were already being prepared for MTN Ghana, Telecel Ghana, and AT Ghana. Communications Minister Samuel Nartey George had earlier pledged that approximately 40 per cent of any fines collected would be returned directly to affected consumers as bonus data or airtime, though it remains unclear whether the incoming sanctions would apply that framework.
