No room for new mobile licenses in Zimbabwe

The Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) says today it can no longer issue new mobile licenses due to limited spectrum.

Zimbabwe has three mobile telecommunications firms namely Econet, Net One and Telecel.

Although a fourth operator state owned TelOne was granted a license, funding constraints have stopped the fixed operator from rolling out mobile services. Potraz acting director general Engineer Baxon Sirewu said the three were adequate to serve the market but noted there was however room for licensing of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) to come in and improve competition in the provision of mobile services.

"We have to embrace convergence and create a converged environment where mobile virtual networks operators can operate," Engineer Sirewu told the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Information Communication Technologies.

"These are people who can come into the market, provide mobile services but do not run any base stations but just customer management equipment. That is the framework we are envisaging for the immediate future to open up competition."

Unlike in the past where licenses were issued to operate in one specific sector, Engineer Sirewu said POTRAZ would be issuing converged licenses allowing licensees to offer a multiplicity of services. He said because of the limited spectrum, issuance of licenses to new players would limit those that are already in operation from expanding their services.

"When it comes to those who can deploy physical infrastructure, we believe we are constrained by spectrum and we are almost at the edge," he said.

"If we add more and more operators, we will constrain the operators in terms of the resources that will be made available to them." While MVNOs do not own physical network infrastructure, they enter into agreements with mobile network operators where they acquire network services at cheaper rates and them set their own service charges.

In most cases the MVNOs acquire their own billing systems and employ their own staff independent of the mobile operator that would have provided them with network access. It is estimated that there are nearly 1 000 MVNOs operating in the world with around 300 of them in the United States.

In Africa, MVNOs are operational in countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.