By David Mugabe

Cutthroat competition in the telecoms sector witnessed in the 2010/2011 period was the major cause for poor quality of service the operators faced during the busy Christmas season, a top official observed last week.

“Good quality of service has a cost which explains why price wars have been so detrimental to most competitors’ quality of service as they did not invest sufficiently to sustain traffic growth,” said Edouard Blondeau, the Orange Uganda chief strategy officer.

The recent quality of service survey by the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC), the regulator,  indicated a decline in quality for several operators during the very busy Christmas season.

Because of dwindling revenues, low user uptake, operators will lack sufficient money to invest in good network quality. The January UCC quality of service report featured Orange as one of the operators with the best network for the third time in a row.  Blondeau said their market share for voice and data was growing steadily.

Total industry subscriber numbers are close to 15 million having sharply shot up during the fierce price wars in 2010/2011.

With more than one million customers, Orange was among the first firms to introduce the 3G services in 2009, which has quickly been taken up as the norm in prepaid internet usage.

“Volume has replaced duration in the packages. However, unlimited packages are still required by some few customers ready to pay for it,” said Blondeau.

Operators are also looking at demographics with a large chunk below 18 years.
 as an attractive are for future investment in the data segment.