I was in Lesotho two days ago on my first trip outside South Africa, and because I was only going there for one night I wasn’t too worried about cellphone coverage.

At the back of my mind I thought that my network provider would be fully operational in that country - after all Lesotho is basically in South Africa.

With the knowledge that the two major players in South Africa’s cellphone market are MTN and Vodacom, I assumed the same could be said about the Lesotho market.

However, Lesotho has only two major players Vodacom Lesotho and Econet Telecoms, with the former leading operations in that country.

So as soon as we crossed the border my phone alerted me to a change in operator, which for the duration of my stay was not MTN, but rather Econet Telecoms network service.

As the leading network provider in South Africa, Vodacom, seems to have recognised the potential of this market, and has so far covered some 1.9 million people on its network.

Lesotho’s population currently stands at 2.2 million so this makes Vodacom Lesotho the country’s biggest market shareholder.

“We started in Lesotho in 2002 and I think we’ve reached a point where we cover more than 80% of the people in the country,” said Malik Melamu, managing director, Vodacom Lesotho.

“I think and feel we can say we’ve done a significant amount of work to bring telecommunication to Lesotho in the time that we’ve been here,” he said.

In Lesotho’s rural areas Vodacom has rolled out network coverage, and 88% of settlements in the country have access to communication.

I have to admit that I don’t fully understand to why other telcos and network providers have overlooked this space? Wouldn’t it make for interesting price wars if Vodacom, MTN and Cell C were to be active players in the Lesotho market?

This would also mean that people could have more options available to them rather than just two players to choose from. A market with the least amount of players gives the top player room to set prices at whatever fee it may choose.

Lesotho’s internet access

Aside from indulging in my piped dreams of price wars in Lesotho, I personally think more people in that country, rural and urban, need to be on par with other African developing nations, especially when it comes to vigorous action to bridge the digital divide.

This mountainous country lags significantly behind in terms of internet roll-out with just 16% of the population currently with internet access.

Melamu attributes this to people in Lesotho buying feature phones, rather than internet-enabled smartphones.

However, he does say that his company has a big strategy around what he calls the Lesotho’s data space.

“One of our strategic pillars is to put internet into the hands of the people creating that access to internet. I think just from a commercial perspective it is probably our big strategic growth path and the fact that there is huge impact we can have in rural areas,” he said.

Greening the Network

To maintain its dominance in the country, Vodacom Lesotho is pushing forward with its mission of providing a much greener network.

According to Vodacom Lesotho it aims to achieve a 25% carbon intensity reduction of 5% per year for each base station by March 2014.

To date the country has a total of 165 base sites and 40 of those are totally environmentally friendly sites what are termed green sites.

Most of these sites have solar panels and only 5 operate on both solar panels and wind turbines. They have become the solution to reducing the use of diesel power.

“Reducing carbon emissions will equal reduced costs to customers,” said Tsepo Chaotsane, senior manager, Radio Access Network Operations in Lesotho.
“We have targeted to build 20 energy saving technology base stations this year, 10 will be 2G and the other 10 3G. We estimate that each would end up costing R2.1 million,” he said.

Chaotsane says more solar power stations would also increase area network coverage going forward.

“We want people to make calls in the comfort of their own homes without having to go up to the highest mountain to receive phone reception,” he added.

However, Chaotsane doesn’t shy away from highlighting some of the challenges experienced at the solar stations, as many are often targets of theft, highlighting not only the terrain difficulties that operators face in the country.

“In some instances when we get to these stations we find that the solar panels have been stolen as well as the wind turbines, and we don’t know what the thieves do with them maybe they sell them,” he said.

So to go back to the question I raised earlier regarding an overlooked Lesotho market, Thecla Mbongue, senior research analyst at Informa Telecoms and Media Group thinks we need to be reasonable when viewing the telecoms market in that country, especially when one considers the size of the population.

“The issue might not be the number of players - two mobile networks is a decent number for a population like Lesotho’s,” Mbongue said.

“And apart from Maseru there is a bigger rural population in the country when it is compared to countries like South Africa,” she added.

Mbongue does however stress that Lesotho’s mobile penetration is seriously low and underperforming.

“In March 2012 the country’s mobile penetration reached 51%, compared to the 62% for Africa,” she said.