THE Vice President, Mr John Dramani Mahama, has urged investors in the telecommunications industry to ensure fair and healthy competition to enable services to be extended to all consumers, irrespective of their geographical location.
He explained that the decision to introduce competition in the telecommunications sector was informed largely by the desire to give players in the sector the opportunity to initiate technical and commercial collaboration in order to share network and infrastructural facilities.
The Vice-President said this when he officially opened the new corporate head office for tiGo at Millicom House in Accra on Wednesday.
He noted that instead of the mobile telephone service providers sharing facilities such as masts to bring down cost of infrastructure and thereby reduce cost of services and products to the benefit of the consumer, the networks had entered into a ‘mast war’.
Mr Mahama said the networks were engaged in competition with one another to erect masts and the competition was so keen that in one area one could count as many as five masts competing, with one another with every mast having its own set of generators to power it.
In an environment where the competition was healthy, he said, one mast and one generator could have been adequate to serve the needs of all the competitors to reduce waste and cut costs.
Mr Mahama, therefore, stressed the need for the operators to collaborate on a higher scale to co-locate to bring the technological and economic benefit accruing from such collective efforts to themselves, as well as consumers.
He said each operator had its major area of technical strength which, when brought under the principle of co-location, could lift Ghana to a higher technological platform to enhance deployment of Information Communication Technology (ICT)
He said quality service was crucial in the telecommunications sector and, therefore, called on the National Communications Authority (NCA) to regulate the performance of key services offered by the operators by setting standards for quality of service.
The Vice-President said the standards must enjoin the operators to submit periodic reports of their service quality as determined by the NCA.
He said Ghana’s telecommunications policies would continue to be geared towards developing a world-class telecommunications network capable of providing high quality telecommunications services at competitive prices to the benefit of the consumer.
In this connection, he said the government believed that having a good telecommunications infrastructure was one of the critical factors that would drive the country’s economic development in this era of Next Generation Network and converged telecommunications markets.
Mr Mahama commended the management of tiGo for taking advantage of the creation of the enabling environment by the Government for private sector participation to enter the telecommunications market of Ghana as the first private telecommunications company to commence investment in the mobile market segment.
The Minister of Communications, Mr Haruna Iddrisu, assured investors in telecommunications that the government would not increase the number of operators in the mobile telephone sector to compromise the market.
He, however, reminded operators in the mobile telephone industry of government policy of encouraging the operators to have their scratch cards made locally.
Mr Mahama explained that the mobile telephone sector was an area that made use of a lot of foreign exchange of the country and having their scratch cards made locally would save foreign exchange and provide jobs for the local people.
The outgoing Chief Executive Officer of tiGo said the network would remain sophisticated but accessible saying that his outfit had re-invested its profits in the Ghanaian economy, adding that tiGo currently provided direct jobs to 450 people in the country and thousands of jobs indirectly through the sale of its products on the Ghanaian market.
Mr Christophe Soulet, the incoming Chief Executive Officer of tiGo, said since he visited the country 12 years ago, Ghana had undergone great transformation in infrastructural development.
Mr Soulet observed that Ghana was poised to lead the continent of Africa in the new ICT industry.
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