The National Communications Authority (NCA) on Monday directed Scancom Ltd, owners of MTN, one of Ghana’s biggest mobile telecom companies, to with immediate effect, cease selling and/or adding new SIM cards/subscribers to its network until further notice.

A statement issued by NCA to the Ghana News Agency (GNA) in Accra, said following the recent spate of service disruptions on the MTN network, the NCA had engaged Scancom Ltd on several occasions on the issues of quality of service degradation being experienced by consumers of mobile services.

It said these included network reliability, network availability, call drop, call set-up and denial of service.

The statement said: “In spite of these engagements, network performance on MTN continues to deteriorate.

“Consequently, the NCA has directed Scancom Ltd to, with immediate effect, cease selling and/or adding any new SIM cards/subscribers to MTN network until further notice”.

MTN has more than 11 million subscribers in Ghana.