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By Arthur Asiimwe
30 October, 2007
KIGALI (Reuters) - Ethiopia will not issue new mobile licenses to private investors until 2010 once a new $1.5 billion infrastructure roll out is complete, the minister for communications told Reuters on Tuesday.
The Horn of Africa nation has launched a project to lay down a fibre optic cable network and erect base stations across the country that will have 85 percent of the country under mobile phone coverage.
"Our policy at the moment is that we are not looking at a second operator. Once the basic infrastructure is deployed by 2010, then we can look at such an issue," Juneydi Sado, minister of transport and communication, told Reuters.
"Because of the universal access issue, sometimes operators might not be interested in the remote areas where financially it might not be viable, so we want to address this issue first and after that we can talk about this public-private issue."
The government project plans to increase the fibre optic network to 14,000km from the current 4,000km and the government also intends to install 65,000 public phones throughout the country, he said.
Juneydi added the Ethiopia Telecommunications Corporation, a state-owned monopoly, had a target to increase the mobile and fixed-line subscriber base to over 10 million by 2010 from the current 3.6 million.
He spoke to Reuters at the "Connect Africa" summit in Rwanda that seeks to increase broadband connection on the continent over the next five years.
"We're investing $1.5 billion and this is going to be the biggest investment an African government has undertaken in the telecoms sector. Once all this is in place, then prices will dramatically reduce," he said.
Ethiopia is already hooked onto a submarine cable running from Port Sudan through the Red Sea to Europe but it also plans to connect other cables from Djibouti and Kenya.