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Telecoms regulator, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (Potraz) has defended charges for mobile data and internet services despite concerns from the public that telecoms players could be making up for reduced voice revenues by inflating the costs of mobile data services.

Potraz acting director general Engineer Baxton Sirewu says mobile telecoms firms were not inflating their data rates since it also falls under regulation.

“We actually regulate tariffs for data. The only difference is that the study that we carried out established a certain margin that was beyond what we consider normal for voice and it found that for data there are inefficiencies with the system and that the cost-build up is quite high.

“So what we do for data is a different approach from what we do for voice. For data we say the operator would bring an application with a cost justified tariff proposal, we look at that and then approve or revert to the operator for adjustments. So it is a regulated service,” said Engineer Sirewu.

In December, Potraz’s ordered that the three local mobile telecoms firms reduce their voice tariffs to 15 cents per minute from the previous 23 cents took effect.

However, mobile voice revenues for the three operators have been steadily declining beyond that.

According to a Potraz report for the quarter ending December 2014, the country’s mobile phone operators registered an 18 percent decline in revenue to $907 million in 2014 from the prior year.

In terms of data services, the local telecoms operators offer options including WhatsApp bundles, Twitter, Facebook bundles and Opera Mini Bundles among others, but users have often complained of “disappearing airtime”, with regards to use of these services.

Engineer Sirewu said although Potraz had received numerous complaints from the public, the real problem could lay with the service users themselves.

“We have a complaints handling mechanism within Potraz and we have received complaints relating to almost all the operators that are in the market, Econet included. What we have found out though is that some of the complaints relate to new technologies like smartphones.

“A smartphone is an intelligent device as it keeps communicating with the network in the background updating some of the applications, so if it is not properly configured you will find that you put your $1 or $2 airtime and it gets chewed up due to the applications updates. But I can assure everyone that we act as we receive the complaints and we do not have any outstanding issues,” he said.

The generally high cost of data has seen the usage of mobile data and internet services in Zimbabwe remaining fairly low. Although the country’s mobile penetration rate has impressively grown in excess of 100 percent, the internet penetration rate (reflecting access) is hovering around 50 percent, which shows limited access to it by a significant portion of the population. – BH24.