Connectivity in Malawi is plunged with so many problems from high costs, congestion, unreliability, etc.
Where do these problems come from and how can they be resolved?
Having done business planning, on costing, for one to make profit, they have to sell their products and services at a price higher than what cost they have put in. However, to maintain profit, if the cost increases the price automatically increases. Is there a way to lower down the price?
A careful understanding of what cost goes into communication media would better resolve what price the use of the media should be. Take for example the copper wire which formed the MTL backbone. It has high capacity but the cost of using it is too high. Maybe higher than Optic fibre. Is this realistic? For one the cost of material for installing the copper wire, is expected to be lower than the that of fibre, the cost of maintainance should be lower than that of fibre and I would expect copper wire to be more durable than fibre so frequency of breakdowns should be lower. This further reduces cost of maintainance for fibre. Because the fibre and copper are shared for many users the cost per user should be much much lower to each user.
The cost of installation should be in my opinion the most variable with one factor of maintainance cost for each media which should cover the difference between various media in terms of depreciation.
The cost of usage should be sorely related to cost of labor doing daily maintainance. For cost of labour is the most stable, it is expected the cost usage to be stable.
Since communication is the major determinant for prices of most goods it is expected that these prices would stabilize and be lower for the benefit of humanity.
What of congestion? Each provider wants to have as many clients as possible as such they put as many strategies to keep their customers for themselves. But does each providers provide what the user really needs? In my opinion, if you have 100 customers, you can invest to provide services for 100 users and still get profit on your investment. Similarly if you have 1000 users. While the perception of profit seems higher for 1000, in reality it isn't much of a difference, as the cost of providing 1000 increases therefore the price of service provision if maintained such that selling to 1000 users fixes the profit margin. Unless the cost for providing is cotmpromised should there be big difference in profits. Now compromising the costs directly amounts to poor services. Which in most cases amount to congestion, unreliability, etc. In the end only providers are happy non of the users are.
There restrictive strategies the service providers put on their customers further increases the costs the customers have to pay to user their services to their satisfaction. For customers have different needs not all of which are satisfied by the providers. It is better therefore that providers put away these restrictive measures for users to use services of their choices to their satisfaction without extra costs. And if a provider has to put restrictive measures then it should be bound to provide all the services the user wants and for the users satisfaction. This then should give less choice for the provider on what and how the service should be provided than for the user. For telecoms it also means removing the extra charge to another network. For the user will always have the need to communicate to someone on another network. And the user shouldn't do this at extra cost.
Different users have different connectivity uses. Restrictive strategies put users who use a less of the resources to a disadvantage than those who use a lot of resources. I.e. users who do a lot of downloads need a seperate connectivity service and users who user the connectivity for simple browsing and data communication. So the usage can be equated to providing quality service to 100 users and to 1000 users. There should be profit still due to the cost/price difference.