Africa intensifying efforts to improve ICT regulation - report

| Friday April 16, 2010 00:00

Its latest 'Telecommunications Regulatory Trends across Africa' report had revealed that there have been varying outcomes to improving ICT regulation in terms of attracting investments and increasing penetration rates of ICT services.

The authors of the report, Selvie Naicker and Fezekile Mashinini, pointed out that the market-based approach to regulation adopted by some countries was gaining momentum with an increased number of countries moving towards further liberalisation of the sector.

'Liberalisation efforts have had mixed-results, although a general correlation between market liberalisation and service penetration is evident from the research,' the authors said.

They added that the mobile sector in most countries had witnessed substantial investments and increased competition, but success in terms of high penetration rates had been mixed with some countries greatly improving penetration rates while in others progress had been slow.

Further, the researchers highlighted that, as expected, some of the recently enacted regulations were negatively affecting operator margins.

'One such example is the introduction of regulated mobile termination rates (MTRs), a notable example being Namibia. Another stumbling block has been the SIM-card registration process, which has negatively affected subscriber growth rates in countries like South Africa,' BMI-T stated.

The SIM-card registration law, which had mainly been prompted by countries' needs to improve national security, had been implemented in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Botswana.

Meanwhile, BMI-T said that some regulators in Africa were looking at prescribing as law infrastructure sharing, which was one means through which some operators have tried to manage costs.-(Engineeringnews)