Uganda: MTN Announces Mobile Money Instabilities
Julius Businge
MTN Uganda, one of the leading telecom operators has announced that they may experience some instability with the service because of the ongoing system enhancement, a company statement says.
“MTN’s mobile money service is set for the upgrade starting November 2011 and phase 1 will be completed in mid December. Mobile money is expected to resume normal service levels after this upgrade,” the statement reads in part.
According to the statement, the upgrade is expected to put the mobile money system on a new platform which will enable the launch of new services and provide increased capacity.
During this period, mobile money services, including new registrations, mobile money transactions, and airtime top-up via mobile money will be intermittent. Customers and agents attempting to transact on MTN mobile money will receive an SMS response advising them of outage or a confirmation of a successful transaction.
Although customers may face difficulty in accessing funds in their mobile money account during the intermittent service outage, any balance they have in their account will remain secure and become available to them once service is restored.
Nyombi Thembo, the ICT state minister on November 18 at the Orange Expo in Kampala urged telecom companies to improve on the quality of service or else their licenses may not be renewed.
A recent survey by telecoms regulator, the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) revealed that none of the seven mobile telephone service providers met the standard for a maximum 2% for dropped and blocked calls.
Airtel dropped 15.2% of its calls, Uganda telecom 11.4%, MTN 11.1%, Warid 8.75% and Orange 3.75%.
Seriously I ope it will be superb when da upgrade is thru cos people are so frustrated.
[...] Money APIs will finally arrive, empowering developers to build more interesting applications. Recent Mobile money outages such as seen with MTN Uganda will not be tolerated and steps will be taken to further regulate as more money is put at risk as [...]
i need a pin