ISP market segment may shrink further — Spectranet CEO

Leading player in the nation’s Internet Services Providers (ISPs) market segment and chief executive of Spectranet 4GLTE, Mr. Ajay Awasthi, has restated the need to review the data floor pricing (DFP) so that segment players can survive.

He made this known to National Daily were he decried that though the firm has a niche, which is high value customers, who want high speed, larger number of GBs and nice experience, however, lamented that the cost of servicing these customers is very high.

He argued that time has come to place a serious check on the bigger players which are the mobile network operators (MNOs), saying their actions are impeding the services rendered by ISPs.

He argued that statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), showed that in the past five years, the Commission had licensed about 103 ISPs nationwide, but only 10 per cent applied for renewal of the licence as at last year.
While noting that the inability to renew operating licences means that they have been consumed by hostile competition from big players who are at liberty to crash data bundle prices at will to weaken market competition from the ISPs segment and others.

Awasthi, who replaced Mr. David Venn earlier in the year said that the trending collapse of ISPs may continue if the regulator failed to intervene urgently with review of DPF.

He posited further that one of the best market segment policies urgently needed is for the regulatory agency, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to establish a bench mark, by considering the cost of production and other variables in determining data prices to save and encourage small operators in the sector.