Benin's telecom regulator (ARCEP) has decided to regulate the prices applied by electronic communication operators, reports Ecofin. ARCEP has segmented telecom bundles and their validity periods. In that price outline, bundles below XOF 1,000 have validity period between one and seven days while those above XOF 1,000 have a validity period of seven days and above.
The regulator requires operators to use per-second billing for voice services. For XOF 500 bundles, the per-second price should be between XOF 0.40 and XOF 0.94. For bundles between XOF 500 and XOF 1,000, it should be between XOF 0.40 and XOF 0.85. The cost will be between XOF 0.40 and XOF 0.75 for bundles between XOF 1,000 and XOF 2,500. For bundles above XOF 15,000, this billing should be between XOF 0.40 and XOF 0.55 per second.
SMS will be billed per unit and cost between XOF 2 and XOF 5 each. Data services should be billed per mega-octet according to the bundle. For instance, for XOF 500 bundles, the price should be between XOF 1.2 and XOF 3.1 per mega-octet and, it will decrease proportionally to the bundles' prices. For interconnection, the ceiling rate set by ARCEP is XOF 10 per minute for voice services between all the networks and XOF2 per unit for texts.