Telecommunication in Uganda

Operating a call booth is still on but one wonders for how long. It has taken various forms from a well configured booth to manually operated phones along road sides.

Back in the days calls from the booths could cost you about 500/- but as of now a minute from these booths will go for 200/- per minute across all networks. This simply means that as that business registers low sales continuously, the vendors have been forced to strategically concentrate on airtime sales and sim packs.

The Telecom carriers are even not making it any better for an average vendor of a booth, because they are literally eating into this very market with new products that are being introduced every other day. Orange came in with 3IN1. You buy a phone as cheap as 39,000/- which comes with airtime and 3 sim cards. Calling within those three numbers costs you 10 shillings per minute at least as per the promotion that ends May 01, 2009.

MTN will give you free messages every time you load airtime making it harder for the booths operators. Airtime of 500 shillings was introduced by MTN for example but looks like the vendors sabotaged it. This was directly eating into the booths sales because from the airtime of 500 shillings, one could easily make a call and send an sms or two as opposed to making one call from a booth and yet you are not comfortable as the operator is monitoring the calling time before you are disconnected.

Public areas like the General Post Office have had to clear the entire area of calling booths as they were posing a security threat.