As MTN start off their defence for license renewal this Monday, Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) has released an evaluation report of the telecom company for the period 1998-2018.
In the report, regulators UCC conducted assessment of the extent to which MTN had fulfilled its obligations under the license agreement and the law for the entire duration of the licence.
In the report, MTN was praised for being tops in most of the areas covering their licence settings. However, UCC also pointed out several areas where MTN had failed to comply.
“The evaluation reveals that MTN has largely been compliant, however there are areas of non-compliance with financial, legal and technical obligations,” the report says.
Some of the non-complaint pointers for which MTN is pinned include;
- Breach of statutory timelines for negotiation of interconnection agreement with operators including Roke Telecom
- Failure to submit reference interconnection offer and failure to negotiate in good faith interconnect seekers
- Failure to report material about erroneous billing, abuse of upstream relationship
- Anti competitive behavior with 3rd party USSD/SMS seekers
- Non compliance with regulatory directives.
Efforts to get comments from MTN about the report were fruitless as TrumpetNews calls to MTN’s corporate affairs manager Val Oketcho went unanswered by the time of filing this story.
MTN’s licence is due to expire in October 2018.
In accordance with the provisions of the license (Article 3.1) , MTN formally submitted it’s application for a single term renewal of the license for 10 years on October 3, 2017.