East African Business Week

Rwanda's mobile market could slow down further after the telecoms regulator closed Rwandatel's mobile services permanently.
The decision reduces competition in the mobile market, which could reduce appetite for mobile services thus reducing mobile penetration.
Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) revoked Rwandatel's mobile licence on April 1 and ordered the firm to disconnect its 345,771 plus mobile users effectively April 8.
RURA accused the operator of non-compliance with its license obligations related to investment plan, coverage, roll out plan and quality of services.
RURA said Rwandatel claimed it was financially distressed.
Revocation of Rwandatel's mobile license puts the company's 300 plus direct jobs and a host of dealers and indirect jobs at risk.
Rwandatel was the third largest mobile operator after MTN and Tigo, the first and second largest operators.
Mobile telecoms services were the second largest revenue earner for the Libya owned firm after data and fixed telephone services respectively.
The operator will continue to offer data and fixed telephony services as it continues to lead the market in these services.
Revocation of Rwandatel's mobile license is a huge blow to mobile penetration in Rwanda although RURA denies the fact.
Before closing Rwandatel's mobile services, there were slightly above 3.6 million mobile users representing 3.6% mobile penetration in the country of 10 million plus people.
This number will go down as some of 300-plus Rwandatel subscribers may not immediately migrate to MTN and Tigo networks.
Before closing its mobile services, Rwandatel was running a Rwf3 per minute promotion considered the lowest call tariff on the market.
Some of Rwandatel's former customers have already complained about the loss of their preferred network and this could change their behaviour in consuming other mobile services.
For instance, MTN is considered the most expensive network.  
Tigo is also not doing well because it lost more than 2000 users between December 2010 and January this year.
This means that these companies will have to improve if they are to attract more users.
Rwanda had targeted to reach six million mobile users or 60% mobile penetration by 2012 but recently RURA said the target would be met by 2015.
Rwanda's mobile market continues to face bottlenecks arising from 'unfair competition among the operators because of inefficient regulation'.
One of the bottlenecks is the Rwf40 interconnection fee per call made on the rival operator's network.
Rwandatel has always complained about this high interconnection fee saying it favours MTN, which has more users.
The two have consistently been disputing with MTN saying that Rwandatel owes it more than US$1 million worth of interconnection payments.  
On the other side, Rwandatel denies the accusation saying it was unfair.
Rwandatel has always called on RURA to influence operators to base competition on the services rather than the infrastructure and subscriber base.
RURA says that it cannot change the interconnection fees until a study it commissioned recently proves that it is necessary to change the fees.
RURA also decided to postpone mobile number portability (MNP) until next year on the account that the mobile market is still young for the system.
However, mobile experts believe that MNP was going to promote competition in the market because it would allow users to migrate from inefficient operators to efficient ones with their numbers.