Raising awareness of the potential of infrastructure sharing is key to APC. As part of our project on Infrastructure Sharing for Supporting Better Broadband and Universal Access, APC is hosting a series of workshops in Southern Africa. The last one consisted of an Infrastructure Sharing Validation Workshop to discuss policy and country reports on this issue.
With the support of the Communications Regulators Association of Southern Africa (CRASA) and the South African Development Community (SADC), the workshop opened up a platform for government, regulators and business to meet and talk about pressing issues on infrastructure sharing (IS). Participants seemed enthusiastic about the possibilities, despite the current challenges and problems. Even though this policy initiative claims to bring opportunities and benefits, a lot of work still needs to be done to ensure that this a smooth and fair process.
After the workshop, APC’s Yolanda Mlonzi conducted the following interview with Mike Jensen, the project leader and author of Unlocking Broadband for All, in Johannesburg.
Most SADC countries seem to be in support of infrastructure sharing (IS) in one way or the other. What are some of the challenges that these countries should anticipate when implementing IS policies?
Some IS policies are no-brainers, like ensuring ducts are included in all new road works, or fibres on new power grids. Others are harder, especially what we call “ex-poste” regulations which are changes to the regulatory environment after the operators have made their investments – this applies for example to mandating that telecom operators must share their fibre infrastructure when requested, or that they must share masts. This can be met with resistance because the operators naturally see these resources as part of their competitive advantage. As a result these kinds of regulations need a strong and transparent regulator to enforce them while ensuring that this does not jeopardise the operator’s willingness to make further investments in infrastructure.
The report talks about benefits of infrastructure sharing. What are these benefits and how do they affect ordinary people?
The direct benefits in most cases are to the operators, which are able to cut their capital and operational costs by sharing resources. However, this translates to benefits to the users because the decrease in operator costs can be passed on to the end-user, while making it more cost effective to connect areas which would otherwise be unserved.
What are some of the opportunities that come with infrastructure sharing that make this a feasible policy for the state, private companies, regulators and new entrants?
The biggest opportunities in cost cutting are in ensuring that all new utility infrastructure (roads, rail lines, power grids, and fuel pipelines as well as water distribution and sewage systems) include ducts for fibre. This is because 80-90% of the cost of laying a new fibre link is in the civil works necessary to lay the duct, while, for example, including a duct in a road building project only increases its cost by 1-2%.
Sharing towers is also one of the major opportunities and this is already evident by the rapidly growing number of towers that are now managed by specialist tower operators which lease space to telecom operators. Wholesale fibre carriers are also increasingly being seen as an effective way of ensuring lower costs because these networks are managed independently from the retail operators and thus are seen as an unbiased party in providing services to all operators. The success of Project Link in Kampala (a Metropolitan Fibre Network) is probably the best example of this.
What approach would best foster infrastructure sharing in your view?
Regulations are needed in some cases to make sure that the additional effort to coordinate infrastructure sharing takes place. In other cases such as tower and fibre cable sharing, commercial/voluntary agreements between operators often work, but even then there may be some cases where the tower represents a particular competitive advantage and may also need regulations to ensure that new operators are not disadvantaged by incumbent networks.
From the SADC/CRASA validation workshop, what did you take away regarding a way forward for IS in the region?
I was particularly happy to see that most SADC member states have already begun thinking about IS and that some had already put in place some of the policy and regulatory elements needed to encourage better IS. It is a big topic though and the discussions among the participants showed that there is considerable work to do in order to cover all the diverse aspects.
I’m particularly excited by the possibilities for developing joint, cross-sector infrastructure databases and geographic information decision support systems. The trigger for this comes from the ICT sector because it stands to benefit the most from being able to “piggyback” on other infrastructure projects, but once in place, such a database could have much broader applicability to many aspects of national planning.