"Quality of service: 6 billion penalties imposed on MTN, Orange, Camtel and Nexttel, after calls for a boycott"

May 26, 2023

According to the CEO of ART, these " sanctions follow the recurring failures observed in the context of monitoring the obligations of coverage and quality of electronic communications services contained in their respective specifications ". It is Orange Cameroon which inherits the largest envelope of penalties, with 2.2 billion FCFA. Next comes the Vietnamese Viettel, which operates in Cameroon under the Nexttel brand, with a penalty of 1.6 billion FCFA. Against 1.4 billion FCFA for the local subsidiary of MTN and only 800 million FCFA for Camtel, the incumbent telecom operator in the country. "The above-mentioned penalties do not exclude administrative sanctions against the said operators, among other things, the reduction of the duration of the concession and/or the withdrawal thereof ", warns DG de l'ART.

These sanctions come after a wave of indignation in the country, following the increasingly pronounced deterioration in the quality of telecom services, which the operators, themselves, put on the account of the multiple interruptions of optical fiber and the supply electric power in the country. A campaign to boycott the services of mobile telephone operators was even launched at the end of April on social networks.