The UCC justifies suspension of free airtime promos

The three providers - Celtel, MTN and UTL - had offered free airtime that would be used by their clients at specific times during the night to make calls.

Celtel Uganda was offering a 50% free airtime between 10pm - 8am, and MTN had offered a 50% extra airtime that could used to call between 10pm and 8am; while Uganda Telecom had offered 100% free telephone calls between 10pm and 7am respectively.

However early this week the UCC issued a statement in which it banned all the promotions of such offers.

"The decision of the Uganda Communication Commission was based on the concerns of the quality of service experienced on the networks during the time of promotions," said the statement.

"We have suspended the promotions to allow the service providers to upgrade their systems, it is to be temporary and would take about one and half months so that when they resume they will be able to handle the increasing numbers of clients," said the UCC executive director Patrick Masambu.

He said that the commission has in the last two months been monitoring their performance.

"The quality of service in the last two months has not been appropriate and it has been very difficult for one to make a call after 10pm," he told HANA in an interview in Kampala.

He said that it was also very difficult to receive incoming calls.

"We have received complaints not only in Uganda but from Europe, Singapore, Australia, the Commonwealth Secretariat that they could not effectively communicate due to the overloaded telephone lines," he said.

"In some countries while we are sleeping during the night, they are waking up and want to conduct business during their day through making international calls into Uganda but they couldn't. So we want all of them to improve their services, if any of them fails, this literally means chasing away customers but we believe they will improve and upgrade especially as we move closer to hosting CHOGM."

However, the public has mixed feelings about the suspension of the services. Some have welcomed the suspension while others are saying they were benefiting from the offers.

"The suspension is welcome because the offers caused inconvenience to us, you could not make a call whether using the offered airtime or using your own airtime," says Peter Kaujju, a journalist with The New Vision in Kampala.

"I remember the other day we got an accident when a motorcycle knocked my child in the night but we failed to communicate because all the phone calls we made could not go through. My husband came to know about it when the child was in the hospital after carrying an announcement over radio," said a housewife in Kampala who requested for anonymity.

"I could tell my mother in the village not to switch off her phone during the night and we could converse like we are together using the airtime offer but now the chance is gone," Eddy Babumba, a fish vendor in Kamwokya, a suburb of Kampala.

However, for the MTN clients the extra airtime that had not been used by the time the suspension took effect on 24 October has been turned into a bonus that can be used to send SMS messages.

Uganda telecom has also made an announcement that in accordance with the Uganda Communications Commission directive, the offer of 100% free telephone calls between 11pm and 7am has been suspended effective midnight 24 October.

Celtel also stopped the offer.

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