In a presentation at the just-ended two day Broadband workshop on Tuesday, principal IT consultant, Vincent Roger Machart, said the regulator should come up with a common pricing strategy so that everybody has access to Internet at the same price. He said the sensitivity of the pricing structure to distance might impede the development of competition in some areas of the country. This is because the cost of leasing capacity to backhaul traffic from locations that are far from the main urban areas may be uneconomical for potential alternative operators and service providers. He recommended that the access charge and the bandwidth charge should both be paid by the Internet Service Providers (ISP) to BTC as it is done in other countries in order for the end customer to deal with a single bill for Internet access and service.
"Current and future technologies are much less sensitive to distance compared to legacy technologies," said Machart, who works for South African-based French IT company, Setics. His recommendations are contained in a 101 page report complied by three IT firms hired by BOCRA to prepare a broadband development strategy for Botswana. The other consultants in the project are Progressus Corporation of France and ICT Consultants of Botswana.The report recommends that the cost studies conducted by BOCRA's predecessor, BTA in the recent past be re-examined against the sensitivity of cost with respect to distance for various capacities.
