ICTworks

As a follow-on to Why Tanzanian Internet Access Prices Have Not Decreased with the Arrival of SEACOM, Jenny Stefanotti has submitted Domestic Broadband Infrastructure Policy: Laying the Foundation for the Future of ICT in Tanzania.

This is the Executive Summary of her thesis, written to fulfill the Second Year Policy Analysis paper requirement for the Master of Public Administration in International Development degree at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Domestic Broadband Infrastructure Policy: Laying the Foundation for the Future of ICT in Tanzania
By Jenny Stefanotti

With the recent launch of its submarine fiber-optic cable, SEACOM removed the most significant historical constraint to East African broadband connectivity. Nonetheless, lack of adequate domestic infrastructure still prevents widespread broadband adoption and the Tanzanian government has enacted very proactive policies in response. Determined to catalyze investment, the government recently began building a national fiber-optic backbone.

Because the substantial fixed costs of fiber networks are largely capacity independent, aggregating traffic in a single backbone can significantly lower the cost of broadband service provision. By encouraging private companies to utilize the government-owned backbone, Tanzania’s policy seeks to maximize cost efficiency and to enable the private sector to focus on last mile infrastructure, content, and application services.

Of concern, in the two years since Tanzania’s backbone policy was first put in place, the market has shifted rapidly. Currently the private sector is eager to invest in national backbone infrastructure on a cost effective basis, which implies public investment at the scale of the existing policy is no longer required. Additionally, the current policy carries substantial risks that remain unmitigated in implementation to date:

1. the government’s ownership of a single national backbone may bias policy decisions;
2. a public monopoly limits incentives for efficiency and current costs for the national backbone are higher than industry norm;
3. the government’s participation in the retail market through the government-owned Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) compromises neutral management of the backbone and exacerbates the concerns outlined above.

As a consequence of these issues, the current policy risks undermining the very objectives it was formulated to achieve.

Recommendations for policy improvements must consider the substantial government investment to date. Furthermore, the government must take care to foster private investment and competition without creating market inefficiencies. By selling conditional indefeasible rights of use (IRUs) and dark fiber across the government-owned national backbone, Tanzania can enable competition in the wholesale broadband market alongside a consolidated infrastructure. Offering IRUs and dark fiber will shift capital away from duplicative investments in new networks and allow the government to quickly recover a substantial portion of its investment.

This approach will achieve scale in the national backbone and foster competition in the last mile, updating the current policy in light of the changes that have occurred in the market since its inception. Furthermore, these policies do not carry the significant implementation risks currently observed.