The 9th Southern Africa Telecom Operators Bilateral Meeting (STOBM2009) started in Windhoek on February 23.
Namibian deputy Minister of Information and Communication Technology Rafael Dinyando officially opened the meeting.
The STOBM2009, being hosted by Telecom Namibia brings together experts in the telecommunications industry to network and exchange ideas on how find ways of speeding up the development of ICT in southern Africa.
The deputy Minister said urgent collaboration is needed to redress the growing current imbalances and general challenge of low ICT penetration in the region. He said the challenge is that telecommunications is dynamic and not every country in the region is able to keep abreast with the new technologies.
"A platform like yours where ideas and experiences can be shared thus becomes a veritable ground for passing on necessary skill and knowledge that will help others keep pace with emerging trends in telecommunications development. In this era, information has become the most critical resource for social and economic development for every nation," Dinyando said.
"The region is facing low teledensity, low electricity supply, poor road network and little clean water. The public sector simply does not have enough resources to plug this infrastructure gap. Apart from all effort put forward by SATA to interconnect the region, cross-border harmonisation remains weak, affordability remains an issue, concerns over foreign investment prevail and the local capital is inadequate," he said.
Telecom Namibia Board Chairman Joseph Iita said it is imperative for the region to jointly integrate and become more competitive by exploiting all the opportunities.
"One key issue is to make interconnectivity of our various countries a reality in order to achieve the goal of increased intra-regional trade and universal access," Iita said.
"It is not far fetched to state that a more comprehensive regional connectivity will mean increased intra-regional traffic from which all operators will benefit. When information flows easily and cheaply so does commerce."
In an effort to accelerate ICT to people of SADC, SATA Executive Secretary Jacob Munodawafa said that SADC Telecom operators must ensure that the latest technology is provided with quality of service.
"Quality of service is a very important aspect in our business especially as we migrate from TDM based technology to packet based IP technology like Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Most of the operators are already using Voice over IP for terminating regional and international voice traffic and we need to make sure that the quality of service is acceptable by our customers."
The 4-day meeting which ends on Thursday is geared towards cementing strategic and operational mutual relations of Telecom operators in all areas of ICT from technical, operational, commercial to fraud management issues.