Dili, 20 February 2024 – The Acting President of the ANC, Mr Novelino dos Santos, was interviewed by an RTTL journalist about public concern over slow Internet speeds, and about how ANC controls and inspects operators and ISPs to solve these problems.
ANC is a public institute with its own legal personality. It carries out its duties under Decree-Law No. 15/2012 of 28 March as the regulator of the telecom sector.
The Acting President said ANC understands the public's concern that Internet speeds are (still) slow. ANC keeps monitoring and inspecting the operators to make sure they meet the duties in their licences and the rules.
On how ANC checks operators, the Acting President told journalists:
ANC has its own control system, with binding procedures, to control, supervise and inspect operators. Through its Consumer Protection Office, ANC also accepts complaints from the public and notifies operators for mediation, to solve public concerns under the procedures in force.
ANC knows that challenges in the telecom sector, such as infrastructure and network capacity, are still obstacles. So we keep working with operators to encourage investment to improve infrastructure and network capacity and raise service quality.
Technically, some of the main factors that affect Internet performance in Timor-Leste are:
International bandwidth capacity and network quality, with limited infrastructure such as enough towers and fibre-optic or microwave links for stable data transmission; remote areas where it is hard to install base stations (BTS) because of geographic and logistic obstacles; the number of users on the network; how well operators optimise their networks; and users' devices and technology.
ANC invites the public to give more specific information about the places or times where the problem happens often, so we can take the right steps to fix it for our country.
As regulator, ANC will keep monitoring operators' performance and encouraging them to increase capacity, expand their networks and invest in the latest technology to improve Internet quality across all of Timor-Leste.
