Kelvin Bowoto
Globacom, one of Nigeria’s main telcos, has been given an additional 21-day grace period to resolve and pay the interconnect costs—an amount charged by telcos for calls terminating on their network—that it owes MTN, one day after the telecoms regulator announced a phased disconnection.
“The Commission is pleased to announce that the parties have now reached an agreement to resolve all outstanding issues between them,” the Nigerian Communications Commission stated in a news release. “The Commission expects MTN and Glo to resolve all outstanding issues within the next 21 days.”
On January 8, the NCC issued a disconnection notice to Globacom, allowing MTN to terminate Glo users after years of unpaid interconnect costs. According to one publication, Glo owes roughly ₦6 billion ($6.7 million) in fees to MTN. The usual interconnect price for local calls in Nigeria is ₦4.30 per minute.
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A phased disconnection would have prevented Glo’s 61.39 million subscribers from calling MTN consumers. However, MTN users would have been able to communicate with Glo users.
According to the Daily Trust, Glo denied that it owed MTN any unpaid costs. “We do not owe MTN any interconnect charges,” an anonymous Glo official told the magazine. The issue over interconnect fees has been ongoing for over 15 years, with MTN threatening to disconnect Glo on multiple occasions. In 2019, MTN suspended Globacom from its network for five days, requiring Glo to pay around ₦2.6 billion in connection fees out of a total ₦4.4 billion. Airtel also threatened to disconnect Glo during the same time period.
Techrectory with Agency Report.
