Competition!! Yes indeed is consumers best friend. In fact, instead of staying out all night pinging, pinging, and pinging.. and nothing much changes...then burning ourselves out arguing on Seacom pricing, we should now strategise how to fuel more competition, confront next connectivity frontier-rural. Skunkworks are pleased to inform you that PS Ndemo will be talking to us about the one million laptops stimulus, technology innovation and entrepreneurship- On Tuesday next week (4th August). I intend to ask him "what would be the government's plans regards hooking Kenya up with http://www.o3bnetworks.com/?" See the attached image. Regards, Alex On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 3:41 AM, Joseph Mucheru<mucheru@google.com> wrote:
Walu,
I personally think it is a bit simpler than that. Over the many years we have lobbied for better services and/or prices in the country, the one sure thing that always worked was competition. In the case of the cables, I think the competitive pressures are much more for the operators as the investment (stakes) are much higher. By various calculations both Seacom and Teams have more than three times the current bandwidth demand. That means the wiser operators will not only be the ones that are first to market, but those that give the right price to attract the economies of scale they need to ever get back their investment. Any operator that delays this process will only have much more future cost to convincing consumers to get onto their network.
I am convinced right now it is a consumers market and what will be interesting is which operators are able to see things from a long-term perspective and win the market. The fact that some operators have a much broader and wider local loop infrastructure only makes this more interesting and does not give outright victory to one.
In summary, investment in the cables is a sunk cost and the game now is who can get the user numbers on their network. Any short-term gains by an operator through higer prices will cost them significantly more in the long-run.
my 2cts worth
Joe Mucheru
On Sat, Aug 1, 2009 at 1:14 AM, Walubengo J <jwalu@yahoo.com> wrote:
Waudo,
Difference -at least on paper- is that TEAMS was put up with Tax payers money by close to 40% (i think). So you and me have a 40% say or demand that they sell the bandwidth commodity at cost. But you and me (tax payers) have 0% (zero%) shares in SEACOM.
SEACOM was put up with 100% private money - only the individual shareholders can decide on pricing (remember the famous SAT3 cable on the west-african cost that had little impact on pricing? the individual shareholders decided to keep the prices just 1-5% below satellite in order to recoup investment with the shortest timeframes. 15 years later, the prcing was still the same at 1-5% satellite costs. That is called Business- increasing shareholders value and yes nobody should apologies for that)
In short, SEACOM can go the SAT3 way and you and CCK can shout as much as they want and they have every right not to care. BUT with TEAMS you and i do have a say - however small it is or it maybe.
And its pretty grey area how say like Safcom with shares on both cables can be compelled to reduce prices because if push comes to shove Safcom can say their data is strictly running on the (private) SEACOM cable which is exempt from all the regulatory pressures. It can chose to say TEAMS is simply it back-up route.
Thats why I think we are breaking new ground here and its going to be very interesting...
walu.
