Airtel Zambia to pay up customers for poor network

Airtel Zambia is in hot water after a weekend network outage left users stranded, and now the country’s telecoms regulator, ZICTA, is making them pay up.

The February 2, 2025 outage lasted over three hours and hit multiple regions, including Lusaka and several provinces. Now, Airtel Zambia has to compensate all affected customers, with the total payout adding up to 4 million Zambian kwacha (about $142,500).

On top of that, ZICTA has ordered Airtel Zambia to upgrade its network infrastructure — especially its data centres — by February 28, 2025, to prevent future issues. The company must also put systems in place to ensure better service reliability going forward. ZICTA made it clear that they’re keeping a close eye on things and won’t hesitate to take action if customers keep experiencing network failures.

Airtel Zambia quickly sent out an apology, letting users know that services were back up and running. But this isn’t the first time the company has been fined for poor network quality — similar outages at the end of 2023 already forced them to compensate customers.

And it’s not just Zambia. Telecom regulators across Africa have been cracking down on poor service quality. In August 2023, Airtel Chad got slapped with a $8.3 million fine for deteriorating network performance. That same year, Cameroon’s regulator fined all four of its mobile operators $9.8 million combined for bad network service.

Over in Togo, Moov Africa Togo and Togocom were warned in June 2023 to step up their game or face penalties. Togocom had already been fined $3.7 million in 2022 for failing to provide uninterrupted mobile service. That same year, Orange Guinea was hit with a $1.1 million fine after a major outage left customers without service for over 30 hours.

With regulators tightening the screws on telcos, it’s clear that poor network quality won’t be tolerated. As for Airtel Zambia, it’ll have to make serious improvements — or risk facing even bigger penalties in the future.

Source: techpoint.africa

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Samuel

I am a journalist specializing in gambling in Africa and around the world. I am particularly interested in stories about games and casinos.

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Samuel

I am a journalist specializing in gambling in Africa and around the world. I am particularly interested in stories about games and casinos.