“Seychelles is among the leaders in the use of advanced technology in the region,” says a report published last week by the department of Information Technology and Communications (DITC).
The report, the first of its kind to be published here looked at the quality of service (QoS) of the Information Technology service. The services included were fixed line and mobile telephone services and broadband Internet service. The factors considered to define a good QoS were: availability, accessibility, bandwidth, performance and reliability.
The DITC says the information collected provided an indication of the performances and an improvement in the network of the operators over the previous years.
Although the report says, “Seychelles is among the leaders in the use of advanced technology in the region” the QoS was only compared between locally based telecoms and Internet Service Providers (ISP).
It shows subscribers have really adopted to the mobile by storm. Since the year 2000 the bubble has been expanding from just fewer than 26,000 subscribers to a massive 54,000 to date. Continuing the trends since 2000 more Seychellois are choosing pre-paid phones over post-paid. Total pre-paid subscription is up by 15% compared to last year’s figure.
As a result less people are subscribing direct exchange lines (DEL). The fixed line penetration for Seychelles has been on a downslide for the past fours years. The decline has been attributed to a lack of infrastructure developments in the fixed network from the telecommunication operators.
The report also shows a reduction in the number of public phones since 2001 where there were a total of 287 pay phones. Although the number of pay phones has decreased, the percentage of available working phones remains fairly high for both operators.
Though the number of Internet accounts remains relatively low compared to the number of DELs, access to the Internet has increased over the last two years with numerous Internet cafés opening up and with the increase availability of Internet in schools.
Seychelles liberalisation process in the ICT sector was triggered by the return of multiparty democracy in 1991. After enjoying a monopoly for almost 100 years, Cable & Wireless was joined by its only competitor to date Telecom Seychelles Ltd commonly known as Airtel.
In September 1996 the island got its first Internet connection. To date Seychelles has two ISPs, ATLAS and Kokonet. Cable television was introduced in 1997.
Critics say despite the indication that Seychelles’ competitive environment and technological advancement are on the right track, however, consumers are being charged higher than in comparable countries and customer services organisations do not have any voice to raise concerns.
No comments:
Post a Comment