Uganda's subscriber base has grown by more than 1.5 million new contracts in the last one year reaching a total of 3, 575,263, an official of the Uganda Communication Commission (UCC) has said.

"This is a net addition of 1.5 million customers between June 2006 and June 2007, representing an annual growth of 68 percent," said the commission's executive director Patrick Masambu.

He attributed the faster growth to the reduced start-up cost of new handsets that cost between sh65 000 and Simpacks at sh3 000.

"It is also due to the aggressive post duopoly marketing and promotion post though the surge in growth could also have led to a decline in quality of service," he said on Wednesday at a halfday workshop to review the status of the communications sector and disseminate a report on the impact of the current tax regime on the sector in Kampala.

"Teledensity, that is the measure of the percentage of population owning a fixed and or a mobile phone has risen to 13.3 percent from the eight percent by June 2006," he said.
He said that whereas only fourteen percent of the population own phones, more than 40 percent of the population access telephony using public pay phones.

"Additional 10 393 public payphones were installed during the 2006/2007 financial year, this number represents the phones installed by the three operators and excludes phone kiosks set up by private businesses."

He said total domestic traffic for the year 2006/2007 was 2.4 billion minutes and that represents an increase of 37 percent from the previous year.

"International traffic that is incoming and outgoing increased by 58 percent close to 370 million minutes, international incoming calls are four times more than outgoing traffic."

"However growth in traffic is not equally proportional to the growth in the number of subscribers indicating that subscriber growth was 68 percent while domestic traffic growth was 37 percent".

He said that tariffs in Uganda are influenced by government taxes that cause upward pushing and competition that causes a down ward trend.

Government introduced a five percent tax on fixed line services and maintained a 12 percent tax on mobile services. "Fixed line tariffs thus increased by five percent effective July 1st 2006".

According to analysts, Uganda's telecommunications market is one of the highly competitive markets in the region and this is evidenced by the increase in innovative services and pricing schemes.

These include innovative optimizing (peak off, peak) calling charges, connection charges of Sim Packs that dropped to as low as sh3 000 ($1.7 million), removal of subscription charges by all operators and the emergence of international voice calling cards.

Furthermore, internet subscribers grew by 30 percent during the financial year from 11 000 to 15 500 but this is a very low number as compared to other countries in the region.

Highway Africa News Agency