adminMartin Kadzere : Senior Business Reporter
THERE is huge scope of saving foreign currency through infrastructure sharing in the telecommunication sector while the notion that the concept is aimed at enabling Government to benefit from private firms’ investments is misplaced, a Cabinet minister said. Information, Communication and Technology and Courier Services Minister Supa Mandiwanzira said yesterday infrastructure sharing was meant to eliminate duplication of investments.As such, this would improve the quality of service and affordability. Minister Mandiwanzira said this while addressing representatives from State-owned telecoms companies at a consultative seminar meant to deliberate on how they could share infrastructure. The representatives were from Zimpost, Potraz, Zarnet, and Tel One
“This country is short of hard currency,” said the minister. “As much as possible we must save hard currency and not import things that are already in this country. We have cases of the operators having three towers on top of the mountain. They will have three generators (and) each company will have to create a road going up there.
“Very often, each one of them sends a truck with diesel to refill the generator. And yet one tower can be designed to look after three networks or even more.
“Therefore we reduce that cost of importing steel used to build towers; we reduce the cost of importing diesel. So the cost savings from a country perspective are also huge.”
Minister Mandiwanzira said the state owned telecom firms should take the lead in embracing the concept. He noted in some cases, Government was wasting on duplicated investments.
“We discovered that the infrastructure that Tel One intended to build under its $98 million facility is infrastructure that Net One has already built under its 218 million facility.
“Tel One intended to have LTE deployment, fibre deployment, and to have several other aspects that Net One is also planning to deploy.
“So this means if we borrow as Government, we take money to give to Tel One, we give money to Net One and they build the same infrastructure. We have not grown the economy, we have actually duplicated the investment, we have increased costs to our consumers, we have not been wise in terms of deployment of our resources,” said Minister Mandiwanzira.
The minister said there was already significant infrastructure sharing taking place in the telecoms sector, but in an unregulated fashion. He said several telecoms companies were already benefiting from infrastructure investment from State owned firms.
“To some extent (it is happening) in a very selfish fashion where people claim to have more infrastructure and they don’t want others to use it, but they are already using other people’s infrastructure. “Tel One has a lot of towers across the country which are being used by Telecel, Econet and Net One. Zesa has many thousands kilometers of overhead pylons.
“That infrastructure is already shared.
“Liquid Telecom is actually using Zesa infrastructure to deploy its fibre optic cables. It is cheaper to deploy fibre optic cables on the pylons than underground.
“Zimpost is 100 percent owned by the Government. It has 226 post office across the country. The biggest users of Zimpost infrastructure are telecoms companies. Econet is one of the biggest.”
Minister Mandiwanzira said mobile telecoms companies were using the infrastructure developed by the Government, but without a proper defined framework.
Potraz, in consultations with local telecom companies has already completed a draft document on infrastructure sharing. It has been taken to the Attorney General for review.
Minister Mandiwanzira said the impression being created by some players that sharing concept was aimed at enabling Government to benefit from private firms’ investments was misguided.
“There is a talk up there that this agenda is about one company…we want to grab infrastructure from one company or we want Government to benefit from the investment done by one company” said the Minister without mentioning name of the company.
“But clearly this private company is using Tel One infrastructure, is using Zesa infrastructure, is using Zimpost infrastructure. Those who make noise about infrastructure sharing are the biggest beneficiaries. They want to benefit from Government infrastructure but don’t want other companies to benefit on their infrastructure,” he added.
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