Ucom urges to reduce the interconnection cost

Co-founder, Director General of Ucom Hayk Yesayan believes that the high interconnection rates hinder the development of Armenia’s mobile connection market.

“I think there is an issue that slows down our market’s development in mobile area – the cost of interconnection. It is the price that operators pay each other for calls to their networks. The current price in Armenia is AMD 8.4 per minute, which is very high. That is why it is cheaper to call over 40 operators worldwide than to two other Armenian operators. The result is that our company cannot provide many minutes for calls to other operators, which is actually a normal phenomenon in Europe and U.S., where operators provide from 10,000 to 20,000 such minutes monthly,” he said in the interview to Golos Armenii.

He emphasized that the interconnection cost is set with the consensus of all three operators, by the regulator -the Public Services Regulatory Commission of Armenia.

“One of the operators is against drastic decrease of the interconnection rates. They are to drop to AMD 7.4 on January 1, but that does not change much. We think the interconnection should cost nothing, actually. I can substantiate this claim. We can give 10,000 times more calls with 4G than we currently do with 2G. So, we are using 1% of our capabilities for voice services because of the cost of interconnection. I believe we have to reach a fundamentally different agreement on this matter, because current rate is hindering development of the market,” said Yesayan.

He also stressed that Ucom has a growing ARPU.

“It means that Ucom subscribers are using more services than before. That is what matters the most: our subscribers can see that Ucom services are really good! In fact, if you look at the average speed of mobile and fixed wireless internet, you’ll see we hold leadership in that are for the second successive year,” said Hayk Yesayan.