Eskinder Michael
Addis Ababa
The Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation yesterday announced that it had made tariff adjustments on long distance mobile phone calls and Broadband multimedia service.
Ato Abdurahim Mohammed, ETC’s Communication Affairs General Manager stated that the tariff for calling from a mobile phone to another and from a mobile phone to a land line and vice versa will be 0.72 cents per minute — a 0.03 cent reduction — when the call is made within the tariff zone (a tariff zone consists of a list of towns under a specific zone).
The tariff for calling a mobile phone from one town to another is the same if and only if the two towns are listed under the same tariff zone). There are four tariff Zones — Addis Ababa, Bahir Dar, Mekele and Dire Dawa.
Jimma, Nekemte, Awasa, Shashemene, Nazareth, Asela and Ziway are listed under the Addis Zone; Mekele, Dessie and Kombolcha are listed under the Mekele zone; Dire Dawa, Harar and Jigiga are listed under the Dire Dawa zone while Bahir Dar and Gondar are listed under the Bahir Dar zone.
Meanwhile the tariff for calling from a mobile phone to another and from a mobile phone to a land line and vice versa from one tariff zone to another will be 1.50 birr per minute (the previous traffic being 2.72 birr).
Ato Abdurahim also stated that the tariff for the Broadband multimedia service that was introduced in July of this year was reduced by 100%.
Ato Amare Alemayehu, Director of Higher Technical section of mobile phones said that the tariff for calling from a mobile phone to land line and vice versa was reduced because ETC believes that the 3 cents previously charged by ETC while calling land lines would be made up for from the growing number of mobile users.
Also explaining why there was trouble in the network about two weeks ago, «There was congestion on the network due to the misunderstanding between the software installed by the Eriksson and ZTE companies engaged in giving their services to the ETC. But we have now found the source of the problem and we have fixed it last week,»
«Whenever new resources are added to the mobile phone network, there are some instabilities detected on the network and that could cause some of the problems until the resources are dealt with. Unless it is peak hours, the network is now performing well.» he added.
In related news, Ato Abdurahim also stated that the issuing of mobile phones stopped because ETC has finished giving out the 200,000 mobile phone lines that were planned for the ending Ethiopian fiscal year.
«We will start issuing more lines in the 104 towns in Ethiopia and other main roads that connect Ethiopia to neighboring countries in the coming Ethiopian fiscal year as soon as the project for issuing 350,000 + mobile phones is finished,» he said.
The tariff rates were put into effect as of yesterday, August 9, 2004, according to Ato Abdurahim.