Lilongwe, February 22: A recent online British Broadcasting Corporation story has revealed that Malawi has one of the most expensive mobile phone services. The two main mobile companies in Malawi are Airtel and TNM the premier league sponser.
According to story, The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) says on average Malawians use more than $12 (approximately K5, 000) a month on mobile phones which it says is more than half of what an ordinary Malawian earns in a month.
It further says on average the most expensive countries in the continent are Malawi which uses an average of 56.29% of average monthly income, Madagascar is pegged at 52.55% and Central African Republic with 51.63% of average monthly earnings.
The cheapest include Mauritius which uses an average of approximately 0.79% of monthly earnings, Tunisia with 1.62% of average monthly earnings and Botswana using an average of 1.64% of average monthly earnings (with figures sourced from the ITU Measuring the Information society Report 2014)
“This makes Malawi one of the most expensive countries in the world to use mobile phones,” reads part of the BBC report published online on February 20.
It further says that the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority (MACRA) has in a bid to bring down the charges in the telecommunications sector, commissioned an independent survey to analyze market trends.
Part of the recommendations presented by the experts is the need to increase competition in the sector currently dominated by two operators, Airtel and TNM.
Ben Chisonga from MACRA told BBC that in order to bring down the tariffs, government might have to intervene.
“We are thinking of introducing more data players in the market.
“For the current players, we are thinking of reducing the interconnection rates which are about four cents per minute, which we believe, is the highest in the continent,” Chisonga is quoted as saying.
It is also said, charges for making calls from one network to another have remained high which makes people to prefer having two Sim cards.
“We know that because of this, the mobile penetration is not high as the 11 million we had earlier estimated. It might be around two to three million,” Chitsonga is quoted as saying.
Andrew Dymond, the lead Researcher who conducted the survey on behalf of MACRA while agreeing on the figures said tariff discounts appear to make a far greater role in Malawi than in other countries with more than 90% of calls made to the same network.
“This means that Malawian users take excessive advantage of promotional discounts which are only usable for on-net (same network) calls,” Dymond is quoted as saying.
Malawi has two main mobile services competitors namely Telekom Networks Malawi (TNM) and Airtel.
