KAMPALA – regional telecom operators have issued a red light against uniform data roaming rates under the One Area Network initiative, citing infrastructure disparities among the member states.

According to the One Area Network, all operators across the East Africa region must use a harmonised rate for both voice and data, irrespective of the setup of their industry, before 2017.

However, telecom operators say current infrastructure limitations between the different partner states make it costly to implement data roaming under the arrangement across the region.

They blamed poor telecommunication infrastructure in some countries, where satellite is still being used to offer broadband services, making it costly compared to those using fibre optic cables.

"The way the technology is currently set for data roaming is complex. If a customer, for example, moves from Uganda to Kenya and wants to connect to data, Kenya must send a request back to the home network to connect the customer to the internet, making it very expensive. This is because of the infrastructure limitations between our different countries,” the carrier services management consultant for Vodafone Uganda, Otaremwa Otuhumurize explained.

This was on the sidelines of the recent joint operators and regulators for the Northern Corridor integrated project meeting in Kampala.

He argued enabling data roaming would require expensive software and hardware upgrades for most telecom operators, making it impossible to do data roaming for the moment.

"I think we might be in a better position to do data roaming after 2017 because new technology is coming up which can enable some networks to do affordable software and hardware upgrades to be able to route data from a visited network instead of sending it back home,” he said.

Harmonisation of charges under the One Area Network is part of a wider strategy by the four regional regulators from Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan, which also aims at seeing a common tariff adopted for mobile money transfers and SMS.

East African Heads of State agreed during in Nairobi summit in May to jointly explore mechanisms of lowering voice, messaging and data roaming charges to support regional trade among the countries.

The director of competition and consumer affairs at UCC, Jonas Bantulaki, said the operators’ views would be presented to their respective ICT ministries before being tabled at the next East Africa ICT forum in Kigali for discussion.

He added that more negotiations were needed to arrive at a position that is acceptable to all stakeholders.

He said: "Among the possible solutions now is defining wholesale and retail price caps for roaming charges based on best prices, as well as harmonising SIM registration in the region to enable sharing of subscribers’ data, improving infrastructure to remove any bottlenecks, and enhancing e-commerce in the region.”

He also noted that the focus should be on developing a fair usage policy for roaming rates, traffic refilling, mainly for the cross-border traffic, and absence of a framework for data roaming under one area network.