The Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications has held the first Infrastructure Stakeholder forum in Accra.

The event held on the theme of fostering Partnerships for Growth in the Ghanaian Telecoms industry is to strengthen the relationship and collaboration with all value stakeholders fostering an environment and mutual growth and prosperity.

The forum is also to provide a mutual platform to address industry challenges and establish challenges for smoother and timely tower deployment and operations to bolster network connectivity.

Speaking at the forum, Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Telecoms Chamber, Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey underscored the need for stakeholders to foster collaboration to address challenges in the sector to realise Ghana’s digitalization agenda

He indicated that, one of the key challenges hampering the smooth deployment and operation of towers and telecommunication infrastructure is the multitude of requirements imposed on various players leading the telecom ecosystem.

To bridge this gap, Dr. Ashigbey said it is important to foster stronger collaboration between the government, its agencies and the telecommunications industry.

“This collaborative effort will not only incentivize infrastructure development in under-served and on-served locations, but also enhance connectivity even in the urban areas especially as we move towards the era of 5G which will call for densification and greater infrastructure support and seamless connectivity” he added.

The Telecoms Chamber CEO appealed for the creation of a one-stop platform where all the permitting agencies will be connected for timely tower deployment.

Also, CEO of ATC Ghana, Ashutosh Singh bemoaned the challenges they faced during tower deployment.

The challenges among others, he stated include land acquisition and high cost, different permitting processes and long timelines, community issues with regards to siting towers in localities and high cost to build.

“There are also the commercial, financial, high taxation and regulatory challenges associated with tower operations. It is, therefore, important that the industry and government collaborate further, have a deeper understanding of the challenges that hinder infrastructure deployment and chart ways to foster partnerships for growth of the tower/telecoms industry. This is the only way the objectives of the country’s digitalization agenda can be achieved” he added.

The Board Chairman of National Communications Authority (NCA), Isaac Osei-Bonsu, called for strategic partnerships among stakeholders for the advancement of the telecommunications industry.

He said in an industry which was so capital intensive driven by motive human investments, network infrastructure and rapidly evolving, stakeholders must be willing to collaborate to effectively harvest the gains from electronic communications.

For his part, the Director-General of the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), Richard Okyere-Ofosu said government is working around the clock to roll out the fifth generation (5G) network to support the digital economy.

He revealed that, they are in the process to develop a comprehensive policy for the efficient deployment of 5G.

Mr. Okyere-Ofosu added that, under the yet-to-be-completed policy, licences would not be issued to individual network operators.

“Rather, an entity would be established to build the infrastructure and provide services to the MNOs. The idea is to create a level playing field for all individual MNOs to secure the 5G services instead of the approach adopted for the 4G where only few of the players had the advantage to secure the network,” he added.