Page 49 - ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services – Recommendations

ITU-T Focus Group Digital Financial Services
Recommendations

Title of recommendation Availability of high speed mobile data access at national level
Working Group Technology, Innovation and Competition

Workstream Mobile handsets use
Audience for recommendation Regulators and market participants in the DFS ecosystem

Regulators should interact with industry to encourage national high speed mobile coverage. To make this cost
effective, this coverage could be facilitated through national roaming and infrastructure sharing.

Not all MNOs have 3G/4G coverage overlaid over their 2G coverage. This gap in provision of high speed mobile
coverage mainly affects rural areas.

This may the result of high spectrum fees imposed by authorities, and/or the uneconomical cost to providers
of installation and maintenance of new base station infrastructure. One or both of these factors – and others
- could discourage MNOs from providing national high speed mobile data coverage, and could discourage the
downstream adoption of smartphone-based DFS-apps that require high-speed access to provide an acceptable
user experience.
Regulators should interact with industry to encourage the provision of national high speed mobile coverage
and also take proactive steps to make spectrum available where required.

To ensure that high-speed national mobile coverage is cost effective, this could also be facilitated through
national roaming and infrastructure sharing where possible.

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