Cameroon Telecommunications (Camtel) general manager Judith Yah Sunday.

State-run Camtel and other mobile network operators in Cameroon have recently traded blame for recurrent disruptions to voice and data services.

This comes as MTN Cameroon and Orange Cameroon have often blamed poor service quality on Camtel's optic fibre connectivity for their networks.

Camtel has a monopoly on the deployment and management of the national optic fibre backbone, which spans over 12,000 kilometers, as well as access to four subsea cables.

“Dear customer, our services are being disrupted by a number of problems with our partner’s optical fibre. For several months now, this optical fibre has been subject to multiple cuts, leading to major disruptions and even interruptions to the services provided by Orange in all regions of the country,” Orange Cameroun informed its subscribers recently.

Camtel said last week that it was seeing an increase in statements from its key competitors aimed at denigrating the quality of its network.

The telco stated that it has always taken all necessary precautions to ensure that it provides quality services, notwithstanding an increase in acts of vandalism against its network and incidents associated with the execution of public works.

“Despite this situation, Camtel has always taken appropriate measures to guarantee redundant connectivity, thus ensuring permanent availability of services to customers,” said Eric Benjamin Lamere, Camtel’s head of institutional and digital communication division.

Instead, Lamere accused the other operators for not investing enough in infrastructure to assure smooth capacity despite big and growing customer bases.

He stated that underinvestment causes congestion, which degrades the quality of service on their competitors' networks.

“Unfortunately, they, displaying a lack of discernment, take pleasure in unfairly pointing fingers at Camtel’s backbone,” Lamere declared.

He went on to say that, while Camtel cannot be blamed for everything, the blame should be commensurate to the company's share of culpability in the latest incident.

MTN and Orange had not responded to Camtel's current outage at the time of publishing.