As TELCOS gets ready to slash expenses soon, the Ministry of Communication promises data price reductions.
According to the Ministry of Communications, Digital Technology, and Innovations, plans are in place to guarantee that telecom firms lower data charges in the upcoming weeks.
Speaking to JoyNews on the sidelines of the “Tekyrema Pa Hackathon” grand finale in Accra, sector minister Sam Nartey George reiterated his resolve to address the “mess” of excessive data costs that were left over from the previous government.
Mr. George stressed that the International Telecoms Union is evaluating the sector to offer solutions on data value and listed important factors to be taken into account in order to provide Ghanaians who are burdened by costly internet services with significant relief.
The International Telecoms Union, or ITU, has dispatched a team to Ghana as of right now to conduct an independent evaluation as well. Therefore, the ITU is conducting its own baseline analysis, but I think that we should see some movement on value in the very near future—within a few weeks, less than a month, or less.
According to the minister, the shift in price and quality is the next important factor to address.
We’ll then take another price action in the weeks that follow. After that, we’ll take action about quality. In other words, value would imply that you could obtain more than 100 gigs at the same price if you were now receiving, say, 100 gigs for a specific price.
Price would imply that the price will decrease rather than being paid that amount for 100 gigs. Therefore, the ministry has a number of tools at its disposal, but we must ensure that the patient is the primary focus when we use these tools.
For instance, we are training AI engineers as part of the 1 million programmers, and we are doing so in part because we wish to employ huge language models to reconfigure current AI tools. Since the “Tekyerema Pa Hackathon” is actually creating language models that we can use to assist not just those with speech impairments but also our farmers, this appeals to my heart and aligns with President Mahama’s goal.”
Beyond helping those with speech impairments, the AI tools facilitate communication amongst local producers, including farmers.
“Today, farmers may use AI tools to increase their output or figure out what to deal with an alien crop without the need for an agronomic to be present. Nevertheless, those resources are in English, and if the farmer was a soybean farmer, for instance, a northern soybean woman farmer who does not speak English speaks Dagbani but is illiterate in the language.
As a Dagbani soy farmer, he emphasised, “It’s crucial that you have a voice-activated plug-in to that solution that can then speak to her local nuance and that’s the difference between her being able to give her soybean the right chemical solution for it to survive and for her to be able to pay her kids’ fees or not getting that service and the soybean getting infected and losing her entire crop for the planting season.”
