Factors Affecting the Quality of Network Services in Emerging Telecoms Operating Environment and Markets

As an emerging market, the telecoms sector in Nigeria has undergone a considerable increase in teledensity, internet usage and consumer base over a decade and is still on exponential growth. However, the consequence of this increase in growth has been a continuous degradation of telecom network quality of service (QoS), which has impacted subscribers’ customers’ needs, satisfaction, expectations and added value services. In exploring the quality of services (QoS) issues, the asset performance is not meeting the agreed key performance indicators (KPIs) on power availability (PA), a critical KPI which is affected by asset maintenance activities. Therefore, this paper focuses on the technical and human factors of asset management and maintenance practices. The methodology used in this paper is the quantitative and qualitative approaches with a systematic review of related literature on the research context. The primary data sources are through a structured survey questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The secondary data source is the systematic literature review on related journal articles to the research subject matter. The paper used the statistical package for the social sciences software (SPSS 29) and Nvivo software for the data analysis. The research results and findings indicate critical maintenance strategic differences in existing asset maintenance activities and operations, cost pressure, and complex operating environments and markets that could be explained through intelligent and digitalised asset management and maintenance strategies. The systematic review results indicate the advancement of asset maintenance strategies to support maintenance planning, asset real-time monitoring and management, as the existing maintenance practice did not match the intelligent-based approach drawn from the concept of Industry 4.0R.