Weekly News

KEY READING FOR THE WEEK This week’s main story is a follow-up from last week on Tanzania. The Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) has imposed a price floor and ceiling on mobile data tariffs. The price floor is Tsh 2.03 (USD 0.00087) and the ceiling is Tsh 9.35 (USD 0.00401) per megabyte. The price floors come into effect on the 2nd of April 2021. The justification given by the TCRA is that the price controls are to prevent predatory pricing. However, like many countries that have either attempted to or imposed price controls (Benin, Uganda, DRC, Liberia), there is no publicly […]

KEY READING FOR THE WEEK This week’s main story is from Tanzania, where the government is looking at ways to charge consumers for WhatsApp calls in order to recoup the revenue operators have lost in international traffic. Data shows that international calls have fallen from 107.2 million minutes in 2012 to just over 27 million minutes in the 4th quarter 2020. The government ascribes the loss in traffic to WhatsApp. The regulatory authority, TCRA, installed a Telecommunication Traffic Monitoring System and TCRA says that this will enable it to identify phones that make and receive calls through WhatsApp. Based on this traffic analysis, TCRA says it is investigating additional data charges […]