CA- ICT Week Presentation 2015

1. Telecommunications Consumer Rights on
Network, Applications, Content Providers
Alex Gakuru
12/05/2015

2. Overview
● Consumer Rights
● Quality of Service
● Poor QoS Manifestations
● Net Neutrality
● Privacy
● Interventions
● Financial
● Customer Care

3. Consumer Rights
46. (1) Consumers have the right—
(a) to goods and services of reasonable quality;
(b) to the information necessary for them to gain full benefit
from goods and services;
(c) to the protection of their health, safety, and economic
interests; and
(d) to compensation for loss or injury arising from defects in
goods or services.
(2) Parliament shall enact legislation to provide for consumer
protection and for fair, honest and decent advertising.
(3) This Article applies to goods and services offered by public
entities or private persons.

4. Quality of Service
● Network outages
– vandalism as popularly cited cause
– no admission of network congestion
– cheap infrastructure, rare upgrades
– investment spread too thinly
– poor design architecture
– incompetent personnel
– consumers pay dearly for services, really no excuse

5. Poor QoS Manifestations
● Subscriber “unreachable” misrepresentations
● Rampant voice calls drops, redial
● Internet sold 3G, but alas only rarely
● SMS delivery failure
● SMS expire after 6 hrs(re-send charge abuses)
● Frustrating money transfer services “delays”
● Poor quality networks costs to the economy
● Applications/Content Servers downtimes
● non-discriminatory access guarantees/parameters
● Consumer unaware/unsure who to contact for help

6. Net Neutrality
● Preferential access to some websites, others
blocked
● Mobicos “zero charge” deal with social media
● India recently rejected “Facebook Zero”
● Consumer Power! Powerful video to FCC: “How
John Oliver Transformed the Net Neutrality
Debate Once” Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Net
Neutrality YouTube video
● Local traffic charged as costly as intern traffic
● much praised IXP a façade? whose benefits?

7. Privacy
● Privacy concerns never used to be a big thing, until Edward
Snowden showed the world how its grossly violated
●
Private data abuses at all levels,
●
National national security implication (Germany, Brazil)
●
DPI technology (or “Deep Privacy Invasion”)
● Confidentiality (Patient-Doctor, Lawyer-Client, financial)
● Insecure communications
●
unsolicited communications

8. Interventions
● Enforce DO NOT DISTURB database
● Providers compelled to disclose use of DPI
● Require operators to offer encryption, inform
● Providers simple, clear and useful messages
● Providers in health adhere to Medical info legal
provision (no more naked SMS of private data)
● Minister declares large public databases servers
protected systems, high security enforced
● Speed up Data Protection and FOI legislations

9. Financial /1
● receive value for money
● reasonable services charges
● True value of an SMS gthing
● no misleading information
● clear rules on borrowed airtime
● Prevent loaning to accounts already in credit (borrowing less
from a bank when one has money?)
● What law governs interest charged on borrowed airtime?
● Operators acting as lending financial institutions (Banking
Act)

10. ● Financial/payments adhere to National
Payment Systems Act
● Services providers activists disclosure (hired
bloggers, influencers, social media)
● Surreptitious marketing services and content
services
● Clear terms and conditions
● Differentiated offers from services
● Product/Service withdrawals (procedure)
Financial /2

11. Financial /3
● Forced (daily) services
● fell for an “all you can eat” offer only to later discover
● restaurant has only githeri and turungi, and sometimes)
● Interrogates basic buyer–seller contractual obligations
● Eliminates consumer choice, every day indebted to SP!
● Mechanism for consumers to ascertain utilised services
● Compensation for losses (constitution guarantee) for
– undelivered services
– defective services

12. Financial /4
● Tariff regulation - pricing guideline → affordability
● Avoid consumption manipulations
● Myriads of confusing services
● Messages encouraging users to borrow airtime
● Forced subscriptions to premium rate services
● Complicated unsubscription, costs meanwhile
● Regulator publishes comparative services and costs
-boost competition
● Else abandons poor consumers in wild SPs jungle

13. Content Services
● Intellectual Property Rights Violations
● Local content copyrights violations
● IPR on actual applications running
● IPR of local software developers
● Opaque hosted content downloads data
● Creative artistes/creators lose millions shs
● Safety of consumer public data held
● Compliance all rellevant laws,
● Ethics (PRSP)- transparent billing, statistics

14. Customer Care
● Interrogate the validity of contracts service providers
vary all the time
● Differentiate between free service agreements and
for-pay contracts
● Effective Customer Support Care (not all IVR)
● Complaints Handling Process (expensive airtime)
● Consumer often afraid to reach out to Authority
● Resultant status quo adverse to their rights
● More Consumer Outreach and equitable action

15. General Concerns
● Providers refusal to broadcast SMS of great
public interest
● Claim its spamming – yet spam own users
● Claim no supporting law - yet do it internally
● Ground to demand require payment
● All providers licenses commit to Tamperi
convention – disaster/emergency access
● Justification – Security is fundamental right
● The airwaves public resources lent to Prodvs

16. Asante