The quote below comes from one of many media reports that carried the results of RIA benchmarking of mobile prices across Africa. SA’s prepaid cellphone pricing is three times more expensive than Namibia’s, making SA among the most expensive countries in Africa despite an intervention to regulate the tariffs, according to a study released this week by Research ICT Africa. The research found that among 46 African countries studied, SA ranks 30th in affordability of prepaid mobile telephony. This places SA behind countries whose regulators have enabled competition by enforcing cost-based mobile termination rates. Kenya, Mauritius, Egypt and Namibia were found to be the most affordable.
The 2nd South Asia Broadband Communications Conference and Workshop will be held at the Taj Samudra, Colombo, 26-27 November 2009. We participated in the 1st conference in 2007 and found it to be quite useful. Our work on broadband benchmarking started as a result.
Banded forbearance, a concept we have been working on since early 2007 which was further developed in our interactions with the Communications Authority of the Maldives, has just been published as a refereed journal article by the International Journal of Regulation and Governance. A previous version of this article was selected for presentation at the CPRsouth 3 conference in Beijing in December 2008. The abstract is given below: Fast growing telecom markets, especially in the developing world, are attracting new types of users, especially those at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP). Innovative pricing is needed to respond to this increasingly heterogeneous demand. However, many regulators still claim to regulate prices using methods from the monopoly era, despite lacking capacity to effectively regulate proliferating tariff plans.