President Sall gives Senegal’s ARTP more powers to control local telcos

The President of Senegal, Macky Sall, has signed a decree that will give the country’s telecoms industry regulator, L’Autorite de Regulation des Telecoms et des Postes (ARTP), full powers to order domestic telcos to divulge accurate information on topics such as communication traffic volumes, Agence Ecofin reports. In the past, ARTP has accused Sonatel, Tigo and Expresso of at best heel-dragging or worse, flagrantly disobeying the rules where it concerns providing timely data on their operations. Under the new decree, however, the ARTP will ‘install and operate monitoring equipment for measuring the volume and quality of telephone communications exchanged on the networks of domestic operators, whatever their origin (national or international). Operators will also be required to host at their expense control equipment and support consumption of electricity and air conditioning, and high availability of the equipment […] this system of supervision and control allows in particular to get on a daily basis the amount collected by operators for prepaid reloads and have a reconciliation and an audit of the average monthly turnover by an operator with a subscriber.’