Responding to inquiries from Standardbusiness, Potraz deputy director general Alfred Marisa said the reduction of costs is also a function of competition, as there is need for a number of companies to sell bandwidth.
“In our case, one other consideration is that we are a landlocked country, hence in order to access the undersea cable we have to incur extra costs of leasing capacity from operators in countries with a coast line to connect to the undersea cable,” he said.
PowerTel was the first company to provide access to the undersea cable through Botswana and has recently established another link to the Seacom through Mozambique.
Marisa said due to competition brought about by Ecoweb, a subsidiary of Econet Wireless and sourcing of cheaper bandwidth from Seacom, Powertel had already on two occasions reduced its bandwidth charges.
“With TelOne recently connecting to the undersea cable, we expect an increase in competition which should drive bandwidth costs further down,” he said.
Permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communications Technology, Sam Kundishora said although Zimbabwe has a high-speed link through undersea cable connecting via Mutare-Beira, the challenge lies with lack of feeders.
“The major challenge we are facing is that there are no feeders into the high-speed link in terms of last mile connectivity, and this is consequently restricting the link to certain areas,” said Kundishora, adding that the country had high-speed internet access in excess of one gigabyte per second.Last mile connectivity is a part of the communication provider’s network that is closest to the customer.
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The last mile is frequently stated in terms of the last mile problem, because the end link between customers and connectivity has proved to be difficult to solve.
Potraz has been building its regulatory and monitoring capacity in readiness for the expected boom in Information Communication Technologies (ICTs).
On mobile service charges being levied by operators in Zimbabwe, Marisa said the tariffs compared favourably with those obtaining in the Southern African Development Community.
“We have one of the lowest per second tariffs in the region in spite of our unique economic environment characterised by high costs due to the need to invest in backup diesel generators and high costs of borrowing due to perceived high country risk,” Marisa said.
He said elsewhere in the region, voice and internet tariffs were much lower due to the maturity of the markets and in other markets tariffs are low owing to price wars , such as in East Africa and Angola.
“We regard such tariff reductions as unsustainable as eventually consumers will pay heavily through poor service and lack of investment into new innovations and products,” he said.
ENDS
