By MATTHEW VARI
Sunday, October 9, 2016 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)
NICTA CEO, Charles Punaha has stated the lack stakeholder response regarding discussions on the ICT sector this week.
Mr Punaha said National Information and Communications Technology Authority, as the regulator of the industry, had over the last 6 years inquiries into various issues affecting the sector and the response from stakeholders has been very minimal.
“One of the challenges that we have and I think this is a challenge I would like to make clear to all the interested stakeholders in the country.”
“For the last 6 years NICTA has been undertaking a number of inquiries on a number of issues and every time we issue a discussion paper with our notices in the media inviting people to comment, and unfortunately most times we see that nobody, we do not receive any comments.”
“It is only a few, we only find Telikom, Digicel, and Bmobile- we would like the wider community, the institutions, education institutions to have a serious look at some of the discussion papers we release every now and then addressing specific issues in respect to some of the regulatory interventions that NICTA undertakes in the industry,” Punaha said.
He admitted that either they were not proactive in their publicity approach, but stated that coverage in the media was sufficient to get those concerned to at least respond.
“It is only when issues come up we start pointing fingers at each other. With regulators also pointing at each other that ICCC should be addressing competition and NICTA should be addressing the pricing- I think that is not the issue we all need to work and collaborate together.”
“To that respect I would like to invite all stakeholders in the country that whenever there is a discussion paper on some of these things they must have the time to review some of these discussion papers and make comments and some of these discussion papers can be access to our website.”
“That is one of the challenges- maybe we need to go out rather than just putting notices in the paper- we might need to invite more.”
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