By MATTHEW VARI
Sunday, October 9, 2016 (Sunday Chronicle, PNG)
STATE regulator of ICT in the country, NICTA, has called on the government to seriously pump capital into its struggling SoEs, namely Telikom and Bmobile-Vodafone in the sector if it wants to remain competitive.
“The issue is with Telikom and Bmobile and now they have set up (PNG) DataCo when you look at these two service providers they are totally underutilized,” NICTA CEO Charles Punaha said.
“Unfortunately there is a lot of government intervention both at the board level, and in some cases in the past for the respective organisations to spend some money they have to go and get approval from IPBC (now Kumul Consolidated Holdings).”
“I think one of the things government needs to do is try and rationalize the existing ICT service providers.”
He both companies are both undercapitalized, financially incapable of trying to compete effectively against Digicel at the moment.
“There must be some, the government must accept that in order for State owned entities to compete in the market they must be capitalized and put in place proper processes so they can compete effectively, at the moment these two cannot compete effectively so that is the issue.”
“I think the setting up of DataCo is one solution but we are not really addressing the issue.”
“If the government wants to be a player in the market then it must put in the financial resources in those companies so they can compete. At the moment they cannot even roll out infrastructure beyond the urban centers whereas Digicel has covered almost 90% of the country.”
“How can we expect them to compete in the market? The obvious one is to combine everybody and we have one service provider to compete with Digicel.”
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