(Ecofin Agency) - Benin’s telecom regulator (ARCEP) has decided to regulate the prices applied by electronic communication operators in the country.

To avoid tariff disagreement between competitors as well as the continuation of mismatch between the production cost and prices of mobile services which are bad for consumers, on November 29, 2018, the regulator published a decision setting a price outline for telecom services. The end goal of this decision is to reduce the pressure on consumers’ portfolio and enjoy services.

ARCEP segmented telecom bundles and their validity periods. In that price outline, bundles below XOF1,000 have validity period between one and seven days while those above XOF1,000 have a validity period of seven days and above.

The regulator requires telecom operators to use the per-second billing for voice services. For XOF500 bundles, the per-second bill should be between XOF0.4 and XOF0.94. For bundles between XOF500 and XOF1,000, the per-second bill should be between XOFO.4 and XOF0.85 and, it will be between XOF0.4 and XOF0.75 for bundles between XOF1,000 and XOF2,500. Finally, for bundles above XOF15,000, this billing should be between XOF0.4 and XOF0.55 per second.

SMSs will be billed per unit and cost between XOF2 and XOF5 each. Data services should be billed per mega-octet according to the bundle. For instance, for XOF500 bundles, the price should be between XOF1.2 and XOF3.1 per mega-octet and, it will decrease proportionally to the bundles’ prices.

For interconnection, the ceiling rate set by ARCEP is XOF10 per minute for voice services between all the networks and XOF2 per unit for SMS.