Senegal: Sonatel gets slapped on the fingers by the ARTP for anti-competitive practices
April 12th 2021
Over the years, the Senegalese telecoms regulator has made the quality of telecom services a fundamental concern. Mobile number portability, introduced in 2015, marked a turning point in this fight. Returned to the spotlight in October 2020, it is now attracting special attention from the regulator.
Senegal’s National Telecommunications Company (Sonatel) received a formal notice from the Telecommunications and Postal Regulatory Authority (ARTP) last week. He is accused of anti-competitive practices. Indeed, Sonatel does not respect the rules relating to the portability of mobile numbers. It allows a subscriber dissatisfied with the quality of service of a provider to migrate to a new provider without changing phone number.
The regulator declared that ” […] tests have been carried out by sworn agents of the Telecommunications and Postal Regulatory Authority, in order to verify the evolution of the handling by Sonatel of porting requests which […] besides the violation of the deadlines set in the various stages of the portability process, the tests revealed that the reasons for rejecting the porting requests mentioned by Sonatel are unfounded ”.
The objective of the ARTP was to give consumers the power to themselves sanction telecom operators offering poor quality of service. Little known to subscribers, because little valued since its introduction, portability has been at the heart of a new awareness campaign since October 2020 which denounced the high cost and poor quality of service and called on the State to act.
The ARTP gave Sonatel until May 7 to comply with the provisions of decision n ° 2015-011 of November 23, 2015 amending and supplementing decision n ° 2015-008 of July 8, 2015 setting the terms and conditions of mobile phone number portability process. After this period, sanctions will be taken against the telecoms company.
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