Comesa’s telecoms project adopts Open Access

As wrangles continue between governments and telecom operators over the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), the Comesa Telecommunications Company (COMTEL) is getting back to its feet, one year after the Anderberg-Ericsson consortium’s pull-out grounded the project. And the new-look COMTEL, which Comesa will unveil in June, is singing the Open Access song.

Sindiso Ngwenya, the Assistant Secretary General of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), told CIPESAFOCUS that they have repackaged COMTEL, and will unveil it in June at a meeting for regulators, government officials and telecoms operators in the region. Comesa technocrats have over the last two months been holding talks with telecoms companies and ministers in member states ahead of the meeting at which the new-look COMTEL will be made public.

Originally mooted in 2000, the plan was for the COMTEL network to be built on the existing infrastructure where available, but in most cases new transmission routes employing a mix of fibre-optic cable and digital microwave infrastructure would be constructed. The envisaged COMTEL route traverses Angola, Botswana, Burundi, the Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Madagascar, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, DR Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Ngwenya said COMTEL would adopt an Open Access model “so that there is no monopoly player for any country,” which he said would help lower the prices of bandwidth. He said costs of bandwidth in eastern and southern Africa were up to 90 times higher than those in the US.

COMTEL will work towards tariff harmonisation and reduction within the region, but its top priority mission is to reduce foreign currency out-payments due to external routing of intra-Comesa traffic. Comesa estimates those payments to be $90 million per annum. The COMTEL network rollout costs are estimated at $240 million. COMTEL also plans to build internet backbones in eastern and southern Africa with exchange node in some countries.

At the New Partnership for African Development (Nepad) infrastructure meeting on EASSy held in South Africa in February 2006, it was recommended that a similar meeting be held between Nepad, regulators and the private sector, where the application of an SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) ownership model to COMTEL would be discussed.

The meeting said an SPV model should also be considered for terrestrial network developers like the Sub-regional Information Infrastructure (SRII) programme of the Southern African Telecommunications Association.

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