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A substantial decline in communications cost is supposed to happen in the countries of South Africa and Zambia. This is after the authorities of both countries made decisions and announcements regarding the mobile inter connection fees set by all the telecom service providers.
The ICASA and the Zambia ICT Authority, the respective telecom regulators of both the countries, have declared that they would be intervening in the working of these telecom service providers because of the high mobile inter connection fees that they have imposed.
The proposal put forward by ICASA states that the fee that is presently set at 0.90 rand per minute should be reduced to 0.65 rand per minute by this July. They further state that it should be reduced to 0.50 rand per minute by next July and even further reduced in 2012. There is no particular proposal put forward by the ZICTA as yet. However, the ZICTA would be implementing its change in the inter connection fee by this June which is earlier than the ICASA. The inter connection fee is a fee that is given by telecom service providers to each other for carrying any call on their respective networks. The idea behind this new policy is to rescue consumers from being exploited by all telecom service providers.
This is a radical change as service providers were free to set inter connection fee according to them. This has been going on since the arrival of the cell phone in Africa more than 15 years back. However, more and more governments in Africa are now intervening in this exploitation that is being carried out by most of the telecom service providers. Zambia and South Africa followed Uganda into trying to regularize inter connection fees.
The initiative is already bearing fruit to a certain extent as several African telecom service providers have reduced their inter connection fees by a great deal.
