Ugee

Uganda Telecom Limited (UTL), which is one of the nation’s biggest Internet Service Provider (ISP), on Monday announced that it had connected its customers to super high speed and capacity bandwidth, through the Seacom fibre optic cable, which has linked East Africa to the world.

But the firm has not directly slashed the cost of connectivity as was expected of the ISPs, with the migration of data transmission from the expensive Satellite powered solutions to the low cost undersea cables like Seacom and The East African Marines System (Eassy), which are live. Uganda is linked to Seacom’s broadband pipe via the Kenya Data Network, which has a direct link to the firm’s station at Mombasa.

While announcing the switch to Seacom’s cable, Eng. Abdulbast Elazzabi, UTL’s managing director, said: "The newly acquired bandwidth not only means more capacity and higher speeds but also that UTL can supply increased bandwidth to our customers at the same price and this will translate into faster and more reliable services to our customers." As an example, he said customers that are using 64 kilo bits per second (kbs) ISP broadband, will now receive up-to 128kbps service, depending on their location without incurring an extra cost.

Ms Monalisa Brookshire, UTL’s chief marketing and product development officer, said the decision to maintain the old prices for new capacity was based on customer needs. UTL has about 9,750 data connection on its network out of the 13,000 live connections in the country. However, there are about two million wireless and fixed internet users connected to about 10 ISPs, according the 2008 Africa Analysis report, which was released in May this year.

Ms Brookshire said most of the customers are corporate companies and medium and small enterprises, which constitute over 80 per cent of Utl’s data customer base. "When making decisions, we always have to go with what the majority of our customers have requested. Most of our customers are corporate and medium enterprises.

They prefer to have high capacity for similar rates," she said when asked why the needs of individual customers were not being catered for.

She, however, said the company will be willing to reduce the prices when more individual consumers sign up for their internet services.

"If we have about one million customers then we will see prices coming down," she told Daily Monitor on Monday. She was unwilling to disclose details of their new price structure because the company has not finalised a pricing strategy that could result into lower costs for customers.

UTL is also uncomfortable with disclosing its new pricing structure because it has no clue about what others like MTN and Warid have in mind.

Mr Augustus Mulenga, the chief executive officer of I-Teleom, which launched its services last week, told this newspaper that the firm would announce its rates in two weeks time after the old players have declared their offers. He anticipated that they would announce their offerings starting this week.

Last month, at the executive director of the Uganda Communications Commission, Mr Patrick Masambu, said the key to lower internet prices was competition among telecommunication companies and fibre optic cable providers. If unfair competition practices like price fixing have not been adopted by the telecom’s, individual subscribers could begin to see a fall in broadband prices next week.

Utl is the second company to connect to the pipe after Infocom Limited, which has also kept old prices for higher capacity but with an argument that prices have come down by over 50 per cent and they continue to descend.

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