Intra-regional calls made affordable as Uganda joins One Network Area

By Silvia Nyambura

Early in January, the Uganda Communications Commission announced Uganda had adopted the One Network Area (ONA).

This is in line with the East African common market protocol that provides for member countries to streamline their telecom services.
It is the culmination of the Regional Telecommunications Policy Framework that was agreed upon by the member countries during the 5th Heads of State Summit for the Northern Corridor Integration Projects held in Nairobi in May 2014.

Governments of member states agreed to amend fiscal policies by eliminating heavy additional taxes and levies on international calls within the region. These regional calls are thus now at parity with the tax base for local calls.

This initiative may result in short-term shortfalls from collection of these specific taxes, but will certainly yield significant dividends in regional economic growth, which in turn increases the tax base in other areas.

To this end, network partners have executed multilateral agreements to put in place aligned and affordable tariffs across the participating countries which comprise Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and South Sudan.

Through this arrangement, mobile phone users travelling within the region will be able to roam like locals and pay the local rates of the country the SIM card is registered.
Previously, roaming customers would pay both the fee of the country they are from and the country they visit while making calls. In addition, they would have to pay to receive calls, which was expensive and cumbersome.

According to Wendy Angu Deyo, the Corporate Communications Manager at MTN Uganda, the elimination of additional direct taxes on regional calls has in turn enabled MTN to package affordable calling rates for both roaming and international calling within this area, designed around a common regional tax exclusive base rate of Ushs10 cents per minute.

“MTN’s One Network offer enables an MTN Uganda subscriber (while roaming in Kenya, Rwanda or South Sudan) to make calls to networks within the visited country and/or to make calls back to Uganda at Ushs360 per minute