The nation's largest telecommunication company, Ghana Telecom (GT), is putting its shares up for sale to a strategic foreign investor with expertise in the telecom industry and the financial wherewithal to push the company forward, Minister of Communications, Prof Mike Ocquaye, has revealed.

Speaking at the meet the press encounter in Accra yesterday, the sector Minister said government's decision to offload its shares in GT is part of its policy to establish a private sector based market force in the country. He disclosed that the privatisation process of GT has commenced with the engagement of Ecobank Development Corporation (EDC) as the transactions adviser for GT.

Consequently, GT is expected by the close of this month to advertise in both local and international media for Request for expression of interest to commerce the process of bidding to attract prospective strategic investors to acquire majority of the company's.

According to Prof. Ocquaye, government has demonstrated a commitment to a transparent and competitive process which has yielded maximum benefit to the country in the past.

He announced that, as part of government effort in promoting the deployment of affordable wireless broadband access, plans are being made by the National Communication Authority (NCA) to announce modalities for allocation for WIMAX service deployment to benefit all the telecom sector players.

These interventions are all aimed at encouraging the private telecom service providers to further plan their infrastructure deployment and investment in a strategic manner", h e added.

The GT under it current management has extended fixed telephone facilities to Assin Fosu in the Central Region, the African Union Village at La Wireless and the new shopping mall at Tetteh Quarshie interchange in Accra.

The old telephone system at Axim has also been replaced with a modern facility and plans are afoot to replace all obsolete platforms with the fixed mobile cellular phone system to enable more customers to benefit from the GSM signal. As part of GT drive to improve the quality of service delivery, it has also plans to develop 100 additional mobile cell sites, which will improve both coverage and capacity for One Touch Service.

Prof. Oquaye explained further that, his ministry is very much concerned about public complaints regarding poor quality of telecommunication services experiences at certain locations and pledged that the NCA has intensified it monitoring and evaluation and has set out clear compliance guidelines for the sector. Deadlines have been also issued to all operators to remedy all quality of service impediments by the close of July, failure of which the NCA will apply in full all the requisite sanctions.

"Let me use this medium to assure the general public that we shall at all times strive hard to ensure that their interest is protected. Indeed the commitment of the private sector players to invest in that direction is also noted."

He stressed that as part of government effort at promoting a wider penetration of ICT services, the Ministry of Communications is facilitating the transformation of Voltacom's Fibre Optic assets into a National Communications Backbone Infrastructure Network (NCBIN) to provide open access broadband connectivity nationwide.

He confirmed that the phase one of the NCBIN project is under construction with the assistance of the Chinese government which has provided a concessionary loan facility of $30 million and had pledged to finance the second phase which is estimated to cost $70 million.