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 55
All the benefi ts stated above can be achieved through a proper liberalization
process in the telecoms industry. The liberalization of the telecoms industry can enable
economic growth across various sectors, but the extent of its success depends entirely on
the transformation of regulatory policies that must be conducive to the development of
competition and on the other hand attract investment and new players in the market.
This study answers the question of whether it is feasible or not to have national
roaming mandated considering the current stiff competitive telecom market structure
in Uganda. It also gives recommendations as to what the government should do to make
a conducive environment for National Roaming. The rest of the paper is organized as
follows: Section two explains related work in terms of telecoms infrastructure categories
and existing sharing models, specifi cally elaborating on National Roaming as a form of
infrastructure sharing. In addition international experience on infrastructure sharing is
highlighted. Section three discusses the current telecommunication market structure, and
then evaluates the technical and economical aspects regarding the feasibility of National
Roaming in Uganda. Section four provides the recommendations to stakeholders
obtained from the study and fi nally concludes the paper.
Related Work
In this section, we briefl y cover some of the common existing telecoms infrastructure
and sharing models including National Roaming and its implementation in various
countries around the world and how those countries have benefi ted from it.
Telecoms Infrastructure Categories and Sharing Models
Telecoms infrastructure considered in this reasearch is limited to mobile infrastructure,
since generally the scope of telecoms infrastructure is very broad ranging from fi xedline
to wireless and mobile infrastructure. Regardless of the design, a cell site of mobile
operators is normally categorized into active and passive infrastructures [Chanab et
al.2007]. Active infrastructure concerns the elctronic elements such as Base Station
Transceivers (BTS), microwave radio equipment, switches, antennas, tranceivers for
signal processing and transmission, and all other electronic systems and components
of the mobile network. Passive infrastructure basically concerns the non-electronic
infrastrcuture including, but not limited to, towers, shelters, air conditioning equipment,
diesel generators, battery banks, and electrical supply, accounting for almost 60 percent
of network rollout costs.
Infrastructure sharing models can take multiple options amongst telecoms service
providers, and the model adopted may depend on the telcom regulation and legislation
or policy in place in a particular country or economy. In [Chanab et al.2007], the main
forms of infrastructure sharing included site sharing, network sharing and spectrum
sharing. These forms were later joined by the following variations, Mobile Virtual
Network Operators (MVNO), National Roaming, and Tower Companies.
Spectrum Sharing: Operators can trade part of their spectrum to other operators
through either direct leasing or other spectrum sharing techniques like spectrum pooling.