Parliament yesterday said it had no option but to craft legislation to force cellular phone providers and other ICT companies to share base station infrastructure as it had become clear the competing service providers were not prepared to cooperate with each other.
Chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Media, Information and Communication Technology Settlement Chikwinya said sharing infrastructure would lessen the costs on the companies and eventually on the consumer. This came out during an appearance before the committee by Econet and Telecel who were being quizzed about their operations.
Econet was represented by company chief executive officer Douglas Mboweni, while Telecel was represented by its CEO Francis Mawindi.
“TelOne is putting undersea cables via Mozambique and Econet is also doing the same, yet TelOne says they have the capacity to accommodate everyone and even more players,” Chikwinya said.
“Why are you not able to collapse these operations into one so that costs can be lessened?”
Mboweni said: “We are on record as being the proponent supporters of sharing infrastructure and NetOne and Telecel had licences two years before we got ours. We asked them for permission to use their base stations, but they said we could not use their infrastructure.
“The truth has to be told because now we have rolled out aggressively and it now seems like we are the culprits. We propose that you call all the companies together to the table so that people speak the truth.”
He said Econet had a debt of $300 million. But they stand at 9 000 shareholders and have a global expansion to countries like Lesotho, Nigeria, the United Kingdom and others and had a mobile penetration of 78%.
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Mawindi told the committee that power challenges had an impact on their batteries and they have had to replace them every two years, resulting in an increase in tariffs.
