A study on the services and service delivery performances of the state monopoly ethio telecom in Addis Ababa claimed that the company has serious deficits in its pricing and the delivery of quality services to the public.

The research was conducted by Forum for Social Studies (FSS), a non-governmental, non-profit policy think-tank registered as an 'Ethiopian Residents Charity' and that conducts independent research and provides a forum for informed public debate of development issues and policy initiatives.

The Second Urban Public Service Delivery in Addis Abeba Public Dialogue, held at Ghion Hotel on the first week of December 2014, engaged participants from Addis Abeba University (AAU), Telecommunications service and the media. Abdurahim Ahmed, the Communication Affairs Directorate director of ethio telecom reflected on some of the points raised by the researcher Dereje Teferi (PhD), Senior lecturer, Department of Information Science, Addis Abeba University.

The telecommunications that came into being in the country when Emperor Menilik II first advocated Ethiopia's membership of the International Telecom Union (ITU) in 1907, which became realized in 1932, has now reached at providing different services such as mobile telephone, landline telephone, and internet.

The study that dealt with the telephone services separately by dividing them as fixed telephone line, wireless Code division multiple access (CDMA), mobile telephone service (2G and3G), satellite telephone service and internet access, found holes in the systems in terms of pricing, penetration, and service quality.

The study that found that there are 813,410 fixed telephone lines in Ethiopia by June 2014 growing only in three percent from the preceding year's 790,168; the penetration rate still stands less than one per cent among the lowest in Africa.

"Since the introduction of mobile and wireless telephone access in Ethiopia, the expansion of fixed lines has declined significantly," comments Dereje.

The mobile service started in 1998, building a client base of 28,000 subscribers in a short time. Then the service was suspended until the introduction of pre-paid service in 2003.

The mobile sector has been growing by 100pc every year, according to the research.Currently, there are 6,000 cellular towers in Addis Abeba, only pushing the penetration to 33pc from 17pc in 2011 and eight percent in 2010.

By June there were 29,307,662 mobile subscribers in the country showing a 19pc growth from the 23,756,607 in 2013. Currently, there are 29.3 million subscribers of mobile service in the country which is planned to reach 40 million when the current expansion project, done with an investment of 1.6 billion dollars contracting with ZTE and Huawei, is finalized. Recently,Ericson has joined by taking four of the six lots that ZTE failed to deliver as per the contract.

The internet service, also one of the deals, was deemed to have low penetration compared to other countries in Africa.

"Ethiopia still has the third lowest internet penetration rate in sub Saharan Africa surpassing only Sierra Leon and Somalia," states the study.

Abdurahim, who explained the importance of the study and the benefit it will have as an input for the betterment of the future services the state monopoly provides, admitted the problem with the penetration of fixed-line telephone service and the Internet service.

"The Internet penetration is low because of the lack of content localization and when we look at the traffic, 90pc is for downloading; this shows that we have very small amount of uploaded contents," says Abdurahim,stating the reason for the underdevelopment.