Uganda will require new telecommunications investors to lease capacity on existing fibre optic cables rather than build parallel networks, in a move announced on 21 November 2018 to curb duplication and reduce internet costs.
The policy sits inside a new national broadband framework aimed at improving efficiency and widening access to high-speed internet. Godfrey Mutabazi, chief executive of the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), said the regulator wants operators to share infrastructure where cables already exist.
“We need infrastructure sharing, if we already have cables in an area, don’t put there another one so that we don’t duplicate these things,” Mutabazi told Reuters.
He said the rule will not apply in sparsely populated rural areas, where investors willing to extend coverage may still lay their own cables to expand access.
According to the government, Uganda has about 12,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable already in place. Under the new approach, incoming operators will rent capacity at agreed commercial rates instead of building separate lines in the same corridors.
Mutabazi said the previous model had driven up the cost of building and maintaining networks, left capacity underused, and kept internet prices high.
The country’s telecoms market has drawn foreign capital in recent years, helped by economic growth, a young population and relative political stability. Major players already include MTN Uganda, a unit of South Africa’s MTN Group, alongside Bharti Airtel, Google and Facebook, all of which have cable networks running in the country.
The government also operates a national broadband cable network that was developed with a Chinese loan.
UCC said Uganda has about 24 million mobile phone subscribers and an estimated 17 million internet users.
Kyle Spencer, executive director of the Uganda Internet Exchange Point (UIXP), said the policy was a step backwards. He argued it would create infrastructure monopolies, slow sector growth and cost jobs.
Spencer said bandwidth prices in Uganda had fallen sharply, from $5000 per megabyte per second in 2009 to about $10 per megabyte per second at the time of the report.
“The system is not broken and the reason that (price decline) has happened is because there’s been significant amounts of competition in infrastructure and service,” he said.
“The market has worked.”
