Bogere Joseph Alfred1, Dr Julianne Sansa-Otim2 and Ronald ...

Part 2: The Feasibility of National Roaming in Highly Competitive Mobile Markets: A Case Study of Uganda 61
the Electronic Media Statute of 1996 [Clinton 1996] [Kibuuka etal. 2004]. The National
ICT Policy was developed (2003) and has provided for the electronic transaction bill,
the computer crime bill and the e-signature bill, all passed into law currently. All of
these transformations are responsible for the current ICT status in Uganda.
As the number of mobile service providers increase in the market, the competition
gets stiffer by the day. Currently, Uganda counts on up to 47 licensed telecoms operators
[UCC 2010] of which 12 are mobile operators and 9 are operational. The active
operators include Warid Telecoms, Orange Telecoms, Air Tel Uganda, MTN, Uganda
Telecoms, I-Telecoms, Talk Telecoms, Smile Telecoms and Bukasa Telecoms. Many
others including Tigo Telecoms are expected to launch their services in the country.
MTN Uganda, is believed not only to have the largest subscriber base estimated at
5.6 million but also the widest network coverage. Air-Tel Uganda is the second largest
operator with an estimated two million subscribers and second widest network coverage
after MTN Uganda, followed by Uganda Telecoms Ltd and others. Despite the fact that
many mobile telecoms operators have joined the Ugandan market in the past decade,
Uganda still has a low telecoms penetration. According to [Kagenda 2010], it was
estimated at 39.0 percent in 2009 and expected to grow to 70.7 percent by 2014.
Mobile providers have responded differently to current stiff competition caused by
the price war. While sone telecom takes the advantage of its wider network coverage and
uses it as a competition tool to effi ciently deliver extra services like the money transfer to
its customers besides low pricing, others have strategically focused on sharp discounts
on calling rates and improvement of the network quality to maintain their customers.
Given this nature of the mobile market structure described above, we evaluate whether
it is feasible or not to deploy National Roaming.
Technical Feasibility of National Roaming
The study was carried out through consultation of documents about infrastructure
sharing, interviewing engineers from the two leading mobile telecoms companies
and observations by one of the authors, who is a telecoms engineer. For confi dential
purposes, the names of the telecoms companies will be withheld as was requested by
the engineers. In this study, we refer to those telecoms companies as networks “A”
and “B”. Below, fi rst we discuss the implementation of National Roaming then the
perspective from the engineers interviewed.
National Roaming Implementation
Roaming ensures that the wireless device is kept connected to the network, without
losing the connection once moved to the foreign network, but for that to happen two
things have to be in place: fi rst, the basic roaming infrastructure comprising roaming
agreements defi ning the Interconnection structure between Public Land Mobile Network
(Inter-PLMN) and billing, and secondly, roaming services of which subscribers from
either networks can access.