The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications has signalled that Ghana’s tough telecom quality standards must be matched with policy support, warning that compliance cannot be divorced from commercial realities in a capital-intensive industry.
According to the Chamber, while operators are committed to delivering better network performance, the cost of meeting stricter obligations in an already challenging operating environment raises difficult questions about sustainability and long-term investment returns.
This follows an announcement by the regulator, the National Communications Authority, to enforce a 1% call drop cap, higher data speed thresholds, and expanded coverage requirements under revised Quality of Service benchmarks that take immediate effect.
Speaking to Citi Business News, Chief Executive of the Chamber, Sylvia Owusu-Ankomah, made clear the industry is not resisting reform but is seeking balance.
“So as a chamber, we welcome the directives from the National Communications Authority. The objective to ensure that Ghanaians have reliable and a high quality telecom services is one that we embrace,” she said.
But she cautioned that “it’s really counterintuitive if the approach of the NCA is to just have new KPIs or measures, which are licensed conditions for our members to meet,” without addressing structural bottlenecks.
The sector, she stressed, operates in a “high capex environment,” and investments must generate returns. “When we have those investments made, we need to ensure that they are being utilised to make a reasonable return on investments for our shareholders.”
Beyond regulatory metrics, operators are grappling with rising infrastructure risks. “Cumulatively since 2025 alone… we spend over 90 million cedis just on repairs,” she disclosed, citing more than 5,000 fibre cuts in a single year.
“You cannot then penalize a network operator when they build the infrastructure and yet that same infrastructure has been sliced up.”
Owusu-Ankomah also pointed to a 62% data usage gap despite 95% network coverage, questioning whether blanket rollout obligations — particularly in commercially unviable areas — should instead be supported through Ghana’s universal access framework.
“We need to look at all these things within the policy framework that Ghana has,” she argued.
For the industry, the message is clear: higher standards are welcome — but without coordinated policy action, the cost of compliance could reshape the economics of Ghana’s telecom market.
CitiNewsRoom
