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27 February 2007
The Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) is planning to lower its service tariffs for its mobile and internet customers.
In order to assess how much of a decrease is going to be made on the charges, the Corporation has organized a committee, which is studying the issue, according to sources.
ETC has about one million mobile customers and 30,000 internet subscribers. Although the Corporation has the capacity to cater to 100,000 internet users and 1.5 million mobile customers, the number of customers has not reached the targeted number. ETC has plans to expand its mobile network capacity to 2.5 million.
“Though we have the internet capacity to serve 100,000 customers, we only have 30,000. We believe that this can be attributed to the expense of the service,” a senior official at the Corporation, who asked to remain anonymous, told Fortune.
Sources at the ETC disclosed to Fortune that the price reductions can partially be attributed to the newly operational fibre optics cable network, which decreases the Corporation’s expenditures by 40-50pc.
ETC charges 0.70 cents a minute for mobile services and 0.04 cents for every additional minute over the contractual 900 minutes for internet services.
“Additional mobile networks are expected to be put up throughout our system and we anticipate a high number of customers,” said the official, explaining the Corporation’s plan to increase its mobile network capacity to 2.5 million, “In order for us to reach our projected numbers, we have decided that discounts on our service charges would play a major role.”
After the price adjustment study by the Corporation’s newly established committee is completed, it will be presented to the Corporation’s Board of Directors for approval. If and when the Board passes it, it will then be sent to the governing body of the telecom industries, the Ethiopian Telecommunications Agency (ETA) for final approval.
The official refrained from stating when the study is expected to be completed.
ETC first began its mobile services in 1999 with 16,000 post-paid mobiles. In 2003 it began its pre-paid mobile phone services.
Internet services, which commenced in 1997 with just 2,000 customers, have at the end of 2006 reached 30,000 users.
Though the number of customers have increased since the Corporation installed broadband technology, the demand for internet services has yet to reach the supply and targeted levels. This slow increase led to a decrease in internet tariff in 2005, but was not a lasting solution and failed to increase the number of customers above 30,000 during the same year.
“Though it is a fact that the number of customers would increase with the tariff reductions, the Corporation is still bound to face another round of customer dissatisfaction if it cannot provide quality services,” commented a telecom expert, explaining the problems in consistency of both mobile and internet services that ETC has faced on a number of occasions.
This tariff reduction on mobile services would be the first of its kind although ETC decreased the price of SIM card prices for pre-paid mobile users from 410.6 Birr to 368.1 Birr in mid-2006.
By ISSAYAS MEKURIA - FORTUNE STAFF WRITER