2 August 2007
Gaborone — The Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) this week assured the emerging Botswana business outsourcing industry that through its international connections, the BTC is well-placed to negotiate better deals for the sector.
Said Vincent Seretse, chief executive of the BTC: "If you do business with us, we can negotiate on your behalf with our partners in London. We can give you competitive rates to sustain Business Process Outsourcing (BPO)."
Seretse was speaking at the Business Process Outsourcing conference at the Gaborone Sun earlier this week. He stopped short of saying the BTC was beginning to accept that its high call tariffs were uncompetitive and prohibitive to Foreign Direct Investment.
He agrees that organisations like the Botswana International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) have legitimately "faulted BTC for prices" in the past.
Seretse says a consultancy study on tariffs conducted two years ago had shown that Botswana tariffs were "comparatively high." However, it was realised that local calls were being subsidised.
As part of addressing the concern, Seretse says they were involved in tariff balancing in which a decision was made to reduce international call charges while increasing local call rates.
He named British Telecom (BT) as one of a number of international partners of the BTC for facilitating the development of the BPO sector in Botswana.
The BTC has signed agreements with BT in a bid to reduce the cost of broadband and to make it easier to access the global Internet Protocol (IP) network.
It emerged at the BPO conference that the Botswana industry is not alone when it comes to concerns over telecommunications costs. Operators in South Africa also have to grapple with Telecom SA tariffs, which are said to be among the highest in the world.
Andrew Planting, a Sales Director at Dialogue Group of South Africa, says telecommunications was an inhibiting factor.
The Dialogue Group operates call centres in the major cities of South Africa including Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town.
"SA probably has the highest (telecommunications) costs in the world. No matter how good your staff is, it has become a costly exercise. It took us a lot of lobbying not only with Telcom, but across the country," Planting told the BPO confernece.
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