21 Jun 2018

Minister of International Affairs and International Corporation Dr Unity Dow says that the Ministry of Transport and Communications has developed National Broadband Strategy to guide provision of connectivity to cities, towns, villages and other strategic areas including along road networks.

Responding to a question in Parliament on behalf of Minister of Transport and Communications, she said the ministry was aware of mobile telephony quality of service issues along Boatle-Lobatse Road.

“The issue of poor connectivity is not unique to Boatle-Lobatse, but common to all road networks,” she said.

In the case of Boatle-Lobatse road, Dr Dow said that the poor connectivity may be partly attributed to the hilly terrain found in the area as well as frequency interferences by some of the operators providing services along this road.

Besides that, she said Boatle-Lobatse road experienced service outage on June 13 and 14 due to an optic fibre cut that was caused by the ongoing road construction.

She said Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority (BOCRA) had issued the operator who experienced frequency interference with new spectrum and the operator in question is already migrating services to the new frequency bands.

“Once the migration is complete, we expect the current interferences to cease and the quality of the service to improve,” she said.

Dr Dow said operators providing services along the road in question had also made a commitment to find resources to augment their existing infrastructure and in this financial year, the operator had made a commitment to install additional base station around Otse Police College, adding that once the installation is completed, the quality of service is expected to improve.

Member of Parliament for Lobatse Advocate Sadique Kebonang had asked the Minister if he was aware of poor cellular network connection between Boatle and Lobatse, what could be the cause of the problem and when would it be solved. ENDS