Feet-Dragging Hits Mast Sharing

Despite a directive by the Ministry of Environment, Science & Technology (MEST) that telecommunications companies should co-locate and share infrastructure, the latter appear to be dragging their feet.

Haruna Iddrisu, Minister for Communications, who disclosed this to the media in Accra during the Ghana Telecoms Summit, said telecoms have taken an uncooperative stance on the order.

“Network operators are not ready to co-locate and share infrastructure. If they all agree to share infrastructure and resources, everyone stands to benefit.”

He revealed that “operators are very suspicious of each other when it comes sharing infrastructure.”

Again, he said the operators are finding it difficult to share their existing infrastructure because they installed them years ago and did not anticipate the need for co-location in the future.

The Minister added that “for instance if you go to Macarthy Hill, you find several telecom towers competing for space, which is not necessary.

“Where there is mutual confidence they can share but they fear being sabotaged by their competitors,” adding that there is the need for co-location of masts to reduce the proliferation of masts in the country.

It is an undeniable fact that Ghana’s mobile phone industry is growing at a fast pace due to the numerous infrastructural development being undertaken by telecom operators and other stakeholders.

The total cellular/mobile voice subscriber base in Ghana as at February, 2012 stood at 21,381,137 yielding a teledensity of 88.9 per cent from all the six operators – MTN, Vodafone, Tigo, Airtel, Expresso and Glo which is yet start operations.

The Ministry of Environment, Science & Technology (MEST) in January 2010 banned further erection of telecommunication masts in the country.

The move was to ensure that service providers obtained permits from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) before erecting masts to bring some order in the way these towers were being erected all over the country.

In line with this, three tower companies namely Helios Tower Ghana (HTG), Eaton Towers and American Tower Company (ATC) were licensed in 2011 to bring sanity into the industry.

The tower companies were mandated to provide tower and ground space for equipment, maintain the sites and generators, ensure co-location or shared tower space and ensure safety and compliance to environmental and health issues.

Tower companies were to ensure a reduction in future capital expenditure for operators, customer service levels and contribute towards increasing uptime of sites and more reliable power supplies.

However, the Chief Executive Officer of HTC, Rein Zwolsman said “mast co-location is a non-issue because we have service agreement with every operator who have agreed on infrastructure sharing.”

He said telecom companies may have challenges in co-location because an operator’s structure of service may differ from the other, but at the end of the day the end results remain the same.

“Infrastructure sharing enables operators to offer value to their subscribers by lifting the pressure of operating the passive infrastructure and providing innovative technology, a skilled workforce and advanced equipment.”

Mr. Zwolsman emphasized that tower companies have the sole responsibility of ensuring sanity in the mounting of telecom masts across the country to help the operators to provide quality services to their subscribers.