GT reacts to Scancom allegations

Accra, Sept. 11, GNA - Ghana Telecom (GT) on Thursday said the adjustment of its tariff for interconnectivity service should not be regulated by the National Communications Authority (NCA) because that responsibility by the latter does not fall under the operating licence of the GT.

Mr Oystein Bjorge, Chief Executive of the GT, told a press conference in Accra that rather, the rates charged by his company could be adjusted to reflect the tariff levels of the other networks and re-adjusted accordingly whenever the need arose.

The Chief Executive was reacting to allegations levelled against GT by Scancom, operators of Spacefon mobile network on imbalance in the interconnectivity charges; GT's monopoly of the fixed-line phone industry which enables it to frustrate customers of the mobile phone companies and the imbalance in traffic and revenue that result when calls are terminated from one network to the other.

Touching on GT charges for both fixed and mobile networks as against revenues accruing to both operators, Mr Bjorge said it was incorrect to assert that the larger the number of subscribers, the bigger the revenue to the operator.

"GT's subscribers can call the alleged 400,000 subscribers of Spacefon and thus generate revenue for Spacefon and GT. "The same trend applies to Spacefon subscribers. They can also call the 400,000 subscribers of GT and generate a higher level of revenue for Spacefon."

The Chief Executive said GT's charges for fixed network to mobile was 600 cedis per minute while that of GT's One Touch to fixed phones was 2,800 cedis and 3,400 cedis per minute for off-peak and peak periods, respectively.

Mr Bjorge said customers' preference to patronise GT's mobile network other than Scancom's was a matter of choice since GT charges for mobile to fixed line was more expensive than its competitor. Scancom charges 2,800 for calls from its network to fixed lines.

Mr Bjorge said the difficulty in accessing Spacefon from the fixed network was a problem for the two companies to solve.

"Our network has several bottlenecks, causing congestion in the system. One of the many bottlenecks was the capacity of the microwave link between GT and Spacefon in Accra and Kumasi," he said.

Mr Bjorge said GT had as one of the many measures to solve this, requested Scancom to increase the capacity of interconnection between the two networks while GT on its part observed the load on the switches with the view to taking intermediary measures to balance the load. On the imbalance in traffic vis-=E0-vis interconnection settlement, the Chief Executive said Scancom's claim that 50 per cent of calls terminated in its network originated from abroad was not true. He said for the period October 2002 to June 2003, 207 million minutes of calls originating in GT's fixed network were terminated in the Spacefon network.

During the same period, only 14.1 million minutes of calls originated in Spacefon's network and were terminated in GT's fixed network.

"This shows that the ratio of the imbalance in traffic between GT's fixed network and Spacefon was 1:15 which means that GT sent 15 times more units of traffic to Spacefon than Spacefon sent to GT fixed lines." Mr Bjorge observed that GT was aware of the congestion on its network due to the heavy traffic caused by the imbalance in the interconnect tariff.

He said the problem was not deliberate and that the company hoped to expand its switch and network facilities as one of the measures to ease the load and open up more interconnect capacity to the other operators.

The Chief Executive touched on the recent labour unrest at GT and said that management had no hand in the actions of the workers to suppress incoming traffic to Spacefon as was alleged.