25 Feb 2020

Acting transport and communications minister says cellphone networks in the Nkange Constituency were available during the 2019 end of year holidays except beMobile.

Ms Peggy Serame , who was answering a question from Member of Parliament for Nkange Dr Never Tshabang, indicated that beMobile experienced intermittent outages during the first days of the new year.

Again, she said the ministry assessed network availability for all sites during end of year holidays and established that all networks experienced congestion due to seasonal upsurge of traffic occasioned by residents coming in for holidays.

Ms Serame explained that the mobile network infrastructure was dimensioned according to the population of a particular area to ensure efficiency.

That, she said helped lower capital and running costs for providing the service to the area.

She said during the holidays, some areas experienced temporary population increase and that resulted in difficulty in accessing networks to make sustainable calls but would not lead to total unavailability of networks.

She further said the ministry, through Botswana Communications Regulatory Authority, continued to engage all mobile network operators to find a sustainable solution to mobile traffic congestion caused by short term demand.

Dr Tshabang had asked the minister if she was aware of the continuous unavailability of cellphone networks in Nkange Constituency.

He also wanted to know what caused interruption and if there were immediate and future plans to rectify the situation. Ends