CyberschuulNews.com

Editions 231 - 260

CyberschuulNews 260

Upper Legislative Houses in Nigeria and SA push for new, controversial laws

South Africa’s Department of Justice has been tinkering with various laws aimed at, it says, dealing with crimes that cellphones can be used to commit. Its recent attempt at pushing a law through the Upper legislative House, the National Council of Provinces, NCOP, to require that international roamers register their phones at entry into South Africa, some say, may practically put a strain on international roaming Agreements between South African mobile operators and those of the rest of the world. Major Cell phone service providers have been fuming about the proposed law but it appears the NCOP is going ahead to pass it.

In Nigeria, the Upper house, the Senate, also says it will amend the Nigerian Communications Act of 2003. If it does, it won’t be a new initiative as the Senate had actually tried unsuccessfully to make amendment to the law during the last regime but was stopped apparently when the former President Obasanjo’s Third Term Agenda became the only issue important to legislation. Chances are that the amendment will reduce the acclaimed powers of the Nigerian Communications Commission especially in the area of its relationship with the Universal Service Provision Fund, USPF, which the Act created.

Analysts appear unruffled about the prospects of amendment to the law, any law, except that politicians who are pushing for the amendment are not those with a track record of being on the side of mass interest.

Poor Broadband penetration dominate Kigali Talk

Africans are still talking. The theme has now shifted to asking for ‘immediate action’. That was the call of the ITU big boss Dr Hamadoun Toure, himself an African, who used popular indices of poor internet access in the midst of fast mobile telephone growth to ask African leaders to act immediately and refrain from asking for charity. He was speaking at Kigali, Rwanda where 'Connecting Africa' was discussed early in the week.

Things are looking up actually. The Nepad ICT Broadband Infrastructure Network (NBIN), launched only recently has been expanded to lay undersea cables on the West and East African coasts. It is however not the beginning that matters but when the infrastructure commences to carry traffic. With government[s], you really cannot count your chicks until the eggs are hatched. Governments investing in telecom? Forget it!


Evolution and Opportunities for Data Services

In the USA, the CDMA Development Group (CDG) recently announced the availability of a white paper entitled ‘Maximizing Network Value: Capitalizing on the next wave of mobile broadband data applications.’ The paper examines how CDMA mobile broadband technologies have lead the evolution of mobile data services and how operators capitalized on their competitive advantage to drive revenue and strengthen their market position. It also analyzes future services that next-generation CDMA technologies will enable.

According to the paper, the availability of mobile data and its importance to operators have evolved with the introduction of high-speed network technologies. From short message service (SMS) supported by 2G technologies to 3G mobile broadband-enabled multimedia services, 3D gaming and location-based services, wireless data has grown to provide up to 20-30 percent of operators revenues and has become a key differentiator in the highly competitive mobile market place. The next major step will be the introduction of all-IP, next-generation infrastructure, which offers low latencies, ultra high-speed data and advanced quality of service (QoS) and support for the quadruple-play: mobile digital video, voice, broadband and broadcast. This will enable operators to compete with fixed Internet-based businesses, offer a wide range of services, including VoIP, advertising, social networking, and mobile TV, and differentiate by integrating presence, location and mobility into these services.

CDG claims that CDMA operators have benefited from a robust wireless data platform that has proven easy to evolve as market needs dictate, have been able to introduce services at least 6 months to 1 year faster, and offer more device choices.

More Troubles for NITEL

Analysts’ hope for a pleasant surprise on the re-awakening of NITEL/Mtel appeared almost dashed last week as workers of the troubled companies seemed to have suggested to Government that their new buyers have no clue to bringing the First National Operator and its subsidiary back to the market for active competition. Nigerian Telecommunications Ltd, NITEL, which loomed large in its monopoly days went into stress in the process of privatisation and dipped into distress when bailout attempts kept shifting from one problem to the other. It eventually landed on the stable of a government’s ‘conglomerate’ called Transcorp, itself a curious creation which is hardly different from NITEL’s antecedents.

The workers have been issuing ultimatum in different directions while government is busy fighting various wars on economic and political fronts: its own legitimacy, an Ironlady in the House (thank God it is now over), worsening [yes worsening!] public power supply, poor quality of telephone services, name it!!. If government is in the mood to listen to the workers, it is yet to be seen. Meanwhile, federal legislators have vowed to open the books once again on Pentascope, one foreign contraption created to bail the sick NITEL out of troubles in 2003 but which actually sent it to the mortuary.

ESSAY
Reprobating MTN, Celtel case against NCC
by
Reuben Muoka

One African proverb welcomes that sometimes, the winds need to blow to expose the anus of the fowl. It may not be for the sake of repudiating the character of the fowl that this proverb so demands, but to show that the pretentious fowl has something ugly that it hides below its fluffy and beautifully woven tail covering.

The recent notice issued the GSM operators, by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, intimating an intention to enforce a compensation regime for the suffering subscribers over persistent poor quality of services in their networks, aptly represents the wind spoken about in this African proverb.

With the wind exposing their anus, they are now in a fit of rage with the regulator whom many have accused of protecting the operators. In going to the court to restrain the NCC, Celtel and MTN have exposed their ugly sides. They have before now pretended publicly that they so loved the subscribers that they would never contemplate any action that would offend them. Today, most subscribers would doubt those pretentious dispositions. If these operators so love them in deed, they would have jumped at the opportunity given by the NCC’s decision to compensate the long suffering patrons. But instead, they chose to stop the regulator with a court action, consequently, seeking to prolong the untold losses of the subscribers to poor quality of services.

The contents of the reported notices to the operators made it crystal clear that the compensation is justifiable, if not long over due. According to reports, the Commission duly informed the operators that it “is still being inundated with complaints from subscribers on the issue of poor and unacceptable level of quality of service on the networks of the mobile services operators in Nigeria, resulting in losses to subscribers”. The regulator also expressed its disappointment thus: “the Commission observes with serious concern that the quality of service in the Nigerian Telecommunications industry has remained poor in spite of the Direction issued to the operators, with the obvious implication that subscribers continue to suffer and incur losses owing to the poor and deteriorating quality of service”.

Whether the two operators, who have found reasons to partner against the NCC are able to read the situation is one thing, the remote possibility of their winning the motion on notice is another. The fact of the matter still remains that they have, through subterfuge, delayed the subscriber compensation regime which ought to have commenced this October 2007. The action border on business without morals and it is hoped that the Nigerian judiciary would not give enough elbow room for this escapade.

GSM operators need not be told that they are traveling along a very unpopular path of infamy and may do well to avoid a reawakening of forgotten displeasures, inconveniences and financial burden it has put on the path of its subscribers in these past eight months when the ugly phenomenon of poor quality of services have become unbearable.

In fact, public angst against the operators has already begun to manifest, even before the substantive case comes up for hearing. A representative of one of the two operators was booed at the recent Senate Public Hearing on quality of service, when he told his audience that the suffering of the subscribers touches its company so deeply. A representative of the National Association of Nigerian Students, NANS, at the same event informed of an ultimatum to the operators to withdraw the infamous court action. These may be a tip of the iceberg of what lay in the hearts and minds of GSM subscribers across the nation.

Is it not absurd that the operators have failed to improve quality of services after many admonitions by the regulator, and after the operators themselves have severally made strong promises to expand the networks to ease the burden of the subscribers? The connotation to this court action is that behind all those empty promises, was an avaricious design to deliberately and immorally sustain the ugly situation of forcing subscribers to pay for services not rendered while the operators keep smiling to the banks!

Perhaps, the action of the operators have exonerated the NCC from many blames over the poor quality of service issues as the commission’s due process approach in whipping the operators into line have been misinterpreted as treating them with kid gloves. While it lasted, the operators were enjoying the tantrums being mistakenly thrown at the NCC over the operators’ faux pax on QoS debacle Now, with the NCC wielding the big stick to bite, after barking at them, Nigerians have seen the true colours of the operators as they have been hiding behind the bashing that NCC was receiving on their behalf all along! They were very comfortable then, but as events have turned, they can afford to take same regulator to court.

For their inability to seize the opportunity to do key things and avert the big stick, the operators have now lost a big hiding place and are now seeking the protection of the courts. The legality and equity in their case against the NCC, and the Nigerian subscribers is already lost in the court of public opinion. It is expected that the NCC would at some point, sue the GSM operators for attracting the commission a wrong perception to the point that even some misinformed government officials, including some legislators, freely made scathing remarks that has no basis in telecoms regulation.
Notwithstanding all of the above, the GSM operators still have a leeway to redeem their image if they can seize this opportunity to withdraw their case, offer apologies to the NCC, the subscribers, and the nation, and commence the compensation regime for the subscribers that they have been taking away their money for services not rendered.

The latest action of the NCC also offers the operators a good opportunity for inward lessons in subscriber-network management as they have all along been engaged in indiscriminate issuance of SIM packs. As they are faced with paying billions of naira on compensation for poor quality of services on the number of SIM packs in circulation, they may now realize need to sell according to the capacity available in the network, and instead, apply the excess funds to improve quality of service and their image for good!

While the damning public opinion against their actions prevails, the operators must be told that most observers believe that what they are doing at the court is simply to buy time while they quickly expand their networks to convince the NCC that the compensation is not necessary. But, do they really need this big stick to do what is in their best interests?

Reuben Muoka, Former Deputy Communications Editor of Vanguard Newspapers is a Telecoms Analyst

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Mobile Number Portability: The Next Agenda

The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, may have commenced setting an agenda for Mobile Number Portability, MNP. An industry consultative meeting in Lagos early in the week brainstormed on the subject under the watch of NCC executives. The Lagos meeting reviewed best practice experiences of successful implementation, sought the input of operators and experts and discussed issues such as implementation challenges, customer education, charging, and rollout modalities.

Mobile Number Portability allows you the freedom to move (or ‘port’) your mobile phone number from any Service Provider or Network to another, while keeping your same number.


CPN reconstructs IT curriculum in primary and junior secondary schools

The Computer Professionals (Registration Council of Nigeria), CPN, has presented new IT training curricular for Primary and Junior Secondary schools to the Federal Government. This was the highlight of its discussion at the Annual General meeting of all IT professionals in Nigeria mid-week in Abuja. The President, Dr. Mrs. Adenike Osofisan, told Minister of Education that the Council is also taking a critical look at the curriculum being used for computing training in tertiary institutions and reviewing it to reflect present realities and development.


UN leads effort to care for people with disability

Information from Techshare 2007, a conference staged by the Royal National Institute for Blind People disclosed that access to online services for people with disabilities, including e-government services, is set to become a key focus of efforts by the United Nations (UN) to promote human rights.

The UN Convention on the rights of persons with disabilities is the first human rights convention adopted this millennium, and almost half of the convention is devoted to access to information technologies.

The key aspects are the definition of disability, which takes an important step in acknowledging that society bears some responsibility for the barriers that people with disabilities face. Also significant is the focus on use of ICTs. 14 of the 32 articles deal with ICTs.

Some 114 countries have signed the convention since it was introduced in March 2007 and the next step is for these countries to ratify the convention, implementing its articles in national legislation where necessary. In the short term, most states will be looking at their own legislation and comparing it with the Convention. Some will have to introduce a lot of new legislation. Others will be identifying any holes and taking steps to fill the gaps.


The business of knowledge, empowerment and national development.
by
Abdul-Hakeem Ajijola

Mr. President, Sir, Mr. Vice-President, Sir, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen.
Knowledge is the key to our survival, advancement and salvation.

Technology, infrastructure and finance are extremely important. But human experience demonstrates that it is thinking based on true knowledge that positively develops individuals, societies and mankind as a whole. Economies grow as a part of this.

We need to create systems from synergies derived from a triple helix of Government, Private Sector/ Industry and Academic Institutions; linkages which would spur innovation by empowering our citizens through knowledge. Knowledge will allow them to translate their ideas into productive goods and services.

Mr. President, Sir, May I suggest the following for consideration?

Approval by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) and implementation of the existing draft COMMUNITY RADIO (CR) POLICY.

a. Nigeria is a signatory to the African Charter on Broadcasting. This defines Community Broadcasting as the third tier of broadcasting. CR that is owned and operated by and for a community and broadcasts in its dialects is the “poor” persons’ Information Communications Technology.

i. The basic low-end equipment for CR Stations with a range of 15 to 30 km costs from N700,000 to N2,000,000. This is exclusive of power, accommodation and overheads.

ii. CR can pass on knowledge useful to the daily lives of the people much more effectively than GSM phones or the use of cyber-cafes. Health and wellbeing, agriculture and food security, justice and accountability, national security and democratic stability, business and the economy have all been shown to improve through the knowledge gained and empowerment achieved through CR.

iii. To date (Oct. 2007), Nigeria has issued only ten CR licences and only the station at the University of Lagos is operating. We can note that, as of July 2005, Mozambique had 45, Senegal 14, Malawi 10, Ghana 8, Namibia 6, Republic of Benin 5, Sierra Leone 4 and Sudan had 4 functional CR stations.

iv. An excellent draft policy was developed in 2006. This was deliberated on by the 37th National Council on Information in Enugu in January/ February of this year. To the best of our knowledge, all that remains is to present the policy draft to the FEC for deliberation: we add our recommendation for approval by the FEC.

Across much of Africa, including Nigeria, those who teach are often not able to undertake sufficient Research and Development (R&D). The reverse is also true. We must better link research and teaching by:-

• Creating a Ministry of Higher Education and Research so ALL Higher Education Institutions and Research Institutes are directly and better linked with each other and their efforts coordinated for effective capacity building. The scope of the Ministry would include:-

• Better funding for teachers/ lecturers with more space and time to allow for an additional R&D workload.

• Empowerment of academia with innovation mechanisms and encouragement of partnerships to generate funds through fair and just Intellectual Property sharing with the Private Sector.

• Government and Academic Institutions to spur innovation to convert the knowledge acquired through R&D into affordable, useful and sustainable products and services for the people.

• Making it normal to involve students with R&D and share findings with them to galvanise the youth and stimulate the economy of the future through them.

• Creating a Ministry of Basic and Vocational Education. Examples of this re-structuring are found in Ghana, Malawi, Pakistan, the U.K. and Thailand.

Mr. President, Sir, we humbly pray that you and your administration consider, endorse and adopt the above suggestions. A “servant leader” will be considered successful if the people can be empowered with knowledge to sustainably improve themselves, those around them, their own material circumstances and prepare better for the future of those yet unborn and the environment they will live within.

Abdul-Hakeem Ajijola prepared the above presentation for President’s Yar Adua’s Business Breakfast meeting on October 23, 2007.
It was however not presented.


Celtel establishes footprint in Ghana by buying Westel, a national Operator for $120M

Celtel International, a subsidiary of Zain (formerly named the MTC Group) has acquired 75% of Western Telesystems Ltd (Westel) for USD 120 million leaving the Government of Ghana with 25%.

Westel is the second national operator in Ghana with license to provide fixed and mobile telecommunications services.

Zain is on the trail of constructing a borderless network which will offer its customers the opportunity to move freely across geographical borders using the same services they would access in their home country, and to make calls without roaming surcharges and without having to pay to receive incoming calls and messages.

Celtel says it now has footprint in 15 African countries with over 24 million customers while the entire Zain Group’s total operations now cover 22 networks worldwide.

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Whazz Up? WiMAX of Course!!

Investment in ICT infrastructure in Africa has improved tremendously in recent years, $3.5billon in 2000, $8billion in 2005, over $12billion in 2007 and we are still counting. A significant portion of this is done in Nigeria and it meant remarkable widening of access to mobile services. Except that it is in mobile services and especially in urban centres that the growth has been recorded.

Hei, how do you access internet today? Dial up, WiFi or Broadband? If you still use dial up, it is either you do not have access to the others or the cost is threatening your means. And that really is the problem of broadband. High cost virtually everywhere in Africa, minus South Africa, perhaps. Wi-fi of course has problem of limitation of hotspots. Yes, several hotels, restaurants and a few public places are investing to provide it on ‘me-too’ basis. Something just needs to go wrong and the system goes down for some long time.

Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access, or WiMAX for short, seems to be presenting another leapfrogging chance for Africa. The engineering of how it works makes that a possibility. Some other guys call it IEEE 802.16, since it derived from IEEE specifications intended for wireless metropolitan area networks. The guys who called it ‘worldwide’ are probably marketers, who, trust them, always play up with words. They it was, who said GSM is ‘global’. Of course it is not but it makes sense to refer to it as such. Ditto for WiMAX. Interoperability, yes because that is its joker really when we come down to the nitty-gritty of its engineering. Microwave, yes, because it is wireless and exploits the movement of electrons in space.

While WiFi [also called IEEE 802.11 because it is IEEE specification for wireless local area network], is limited in most cases to only 30 - 100m, WiMAX can provide broadband wireless access up to 50 km for fixed stations, and 5 - 15 km for mobile stations. What does that translate to in practical terms.

Another leapfrogging chance is presenting itself and African Governments cannot afford to let go yet another revolution in communications techniques. It will challenge everything in us though; smart regulations, robust capacity building, reordered education etc.


Voice-to-Text Service debuts in South Africa

Africa’s first Voice messages via text went out on commercial operation in Johannesburg last Monday. It was launched by Vodacom which uses SpinVox UK’s technology. The service had been in English, French, German, and Spanish in several places in Europe and North America.

It is a platform on which smart business men may eventually build value added services.


ATCON to attract partners for NICOMM

Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, ATCON, may have entered into a for-the-future arrangement with the Yankee Group – a multinational event management outfit based in Boston, USA. The company which may be at NICOMM2007, Muson centre, Lagos October 22 - 24 on observer status this year may be considered as partner for mounting future editions of NICOMM if things go as planned.

Dr Emmanuel Ekuwem, President of ATCON, confirmed during the week that the WiMAX Forum which will also be sending delegates to participate in the next week’s EXPO will be doing so in preparation for future relationship in the organisation of NICOMM.

ITWeek Online goes on-line

An online news publication, known as ITWeek Online is now routing at www.itweekonline.com

Biodun Durojaiye who announced its launch early in the week says the e-magazine will have community features such as forum, polls, classified ads, gallery, survey tools, etc
ITWeek Online is the latest addition to several successful efforts which Nigerians, especially news writers, many of them continental award winners, have placed on the web.

35 years after, cellphone inventors gathered for a honour party

Although the first cellular phone service offering was provided in Chicago, USA by Ameritech Mobile Communications Inc in 1983, it actually used the Motorola cellular portables whose initial design commenced in the last quarter of 1972.

The design engineers were not working to a mass appeal but towards what could be used by a select group of businessmen who had the big bucks. It was actually a survivalist’s instinct of Motorola which had to fight the obsession of AT&T by asking its engineers to design something portable and mobile. But that is not the news.

The news is that those engineers who started the thinking in 1972 gathered together last week and were treated to a honour party and talk show. And in Chicago where they started it in ‘72.

A gentleman called Donald Linder led the team and he was at the party. Now retired, Linder said it is amazing how what they were conscripted to do had turned out to be a global piece of fun and fancy. Commerce was not on their mind but the mission to do it so AT & T’s monopoly could be checkmated. It was eleven years after they commenced work that it became a commercial product and it was another ten years after the commercial launch that it became a popular consumer product.

The engineers came out to be counted and stood tall in the eyes of the world. The party was staged by GlobalSpec Inc whose Chairman, Jeffrey Killeen, said the feat was ‘extraordinary creativity’.

***Fuller story on the event and related issues in future editions of CyberschuulNews.
 

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14 Trade Missions expected at NICOMM 2007

Latest information from ATCON secretariat in Lagos is that not less than 14 trade missions have indicated interest to participate in the forthcoming NICOMM Exhibition and Conference holding from October 22 – 24 at MUSON Centre Lagos. Specifically on the list of ATCON’s guests are trade groups from USA, Britain, Hong Kong, China, India, Korea, Dubai, Taiwan, Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Malaysia, Egypt, and Lebanon.

Dr. Emanuel Ekuwem, President of ATCON says the conference session would present investors’ experiences on the way forward on topical industry issues such as financing, power sector reforms, deployment of WImax, and number portability.


ROUTING FOR OPEN SOURCE
CTO Pushes a global agenda

Why Open Source?

Open Source software presents an opportunity to cut costs, to see inside the software, demystify technology and understand the design so that all users can adapt technology to meet their own needs. It is widely seen as the key enabler for developing countries to achieve technological self-determination. Open source can reduce total cost of ownership, enhance security, and create a vendor-independent network based on interoperability and open standards. Open source software also provides the opportunity to break free from the shackles of proprietary systems and expensive upgrades. Those are the things experts are saying.

The Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation, CTO, has announced that it is hosting a three-day event in December devoted to Open Source. The organization is ensuring that several ICT giants, start-ups, ministers, senior representatives from the public and private sectors are there to analyse how open source is capable of bridging the digital divide and how it is finding its way into mobile systems.

Specifically, the One Laptop Per Child, OLPC project has chosen Open Source; Several experts have given presentations on how open source can work with existing applications; They talk about several advantages which open Source can offer that proprietary systems cannot; and mobile operators are even harnessing open source to deliver superior smart-phone features in inexpensive handsets.

Seems that after HIV, the world’s attention may just shift to Open Source.

ANALYSIS
Hallo, who is listening?

Last week, Ernest Ndukwe, Chief executive of Nigerian Communications Commission, took the rostrum at the Champion’s annual lecture in Lagos to review Nigeria’s march to attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. His lecture gave a lot away about his perception of the federal government and indeed of Nigerians understanding of his annual call for major power sector reform which although sounds too obvious for mentioning, appears to be completely un-understood. Ndukwe, ever since he led Nigeria into the telecom open sesame in 2000 has not made an annual speech at any of the past 4 Nigerian Telecom Summits without stressing the danger that poor public power supply posed to the progress recordable in telecom sector.

Listening to him with a third ear, it seems suggestive that Ndukwe is saying that it may not be money that reform in power sector seriously requires. We have heard the expired government told us how much in several billions of naira it invested in the power sector to reform it. Result? President Yar Adua has declared war [total hopefully] on the reform path. What does that really mean? And that is the crux of the matter.

Ndukwe comes forth as someone who should know what he is talking. For two reasons: One: P & T and later NITEL serving as midwife, Nigeria sunk $5billion into telecom development from 1960 to 1999. Nothing was there to show for the investment. Secondly, in 2000, something happened and Government stopped spending money in the telecom sector. Not only did things change to look upwards, the industry netted $10 billion in earnings in six years and it is forecast that something more than that may even come into in industry in the next five.

The issue now really is that if the projection will be realized, it seems Ndukwe is saying something must happen. And that thing should be in terms of ‘revised’ power sector reforms. Reform, for emphasis, may not just mean throwing money into a problem and awarding contracts to build generating stations and transmission pylons, but in reordering the priorities and processes.

To date, two major things are known to have exemplified the reform in the power sector, namely: Money spending and name changing. That is if we take the establishment of National Electric Power Regulatory Commission, NEPRC, as a fundamental pillar of the on-going reform. That is to say that the NEPRC is the agency to watch, not really Aso Rock as Mr. President’s declared war may seem to goad us.


MTN, CELTEL, head for the court

Two Mobile operators MTN and Celtel are known to have quietly obtained a court injunction restraining NCC from evoking sanction on them by preventing the 'Direction' which the regulator warned it would issue if quality of service did not improve in the month of October.

Late September, the NCC had warned each of the 3 Mobile operators [MTN, Celtel and Globacom] that it would use the observed key performance indicator of Traffic Channel Congestion to apportion mandatory compensation to their subscribers in the month of October. It warned further that should the compensation apply, it must be paid in terms of airtime credit to subscribers not later than day 7 of the succeeding month.

Virtually all the operators have been announcing huge investment figures for network expansion just as they take every opportunity to draw attention to desirable power sector reforms.

It is not unusual for service providers to resort to legal arm twisting when they come face to face with the wrath of governments, regulators, consumers or money-lenders.
 

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Universal Licensees are now 13

Apart from NITEL and Globacom which are First and Second National Operators, 13 other licensees that may provide subscriber services nationwide have emerged according to a recent announcement by the Nigerian Communications Commission.

They include: Celtel Nigeria Ltd., Danjay Telecomms Ltd., Emerging Markets Telecommunication Services Ltd., Gamjitel Ltd., Gicell Wireless Ltd., Intercellular Nigeria Plc, MTN Nigeria Communications Ltd., Multi–Links Telecommunications Ltd., Prest Cable & Satellite TV Systems Ltd., Reliance Telecommunications Ltd., Siotel Nigeria Ltd, Starcomms Ltd., and Visafone Communications Ltd.

Among all of these, only three; NITEL, Globacom, and MTN are known to have been building transmission backbone in the past. Five are start-ups. Celtel while signing a contract with Nokia Siemens Networks for construction of 4000km of nationwide fibre optic transmission infrastructure last Monday said it will, by that contract, be expanding existing routes to double the network capacity by first quarter of 2008.

Siemens/Nokia Joint Venture goes sour
Gets Celtel deal in Nigeria

Siemens indicated in Germany last weekend that it is unhappy with the joint venture it went into with Finland’s Nokia. The ‘absolutely unsatisfied’ verdict did not indicate clearly however whether Siemens may be routing for a withdrawal from the partnership. If it would opt out of the venture which should normally run till 2013, it needs Nokia’s consent, lest the penalty clause comes into play.

Nigerian analysts had wondered all along how Nokia and Siemens found a common bed to sleep on. Nokia in spite of its early attempt to dive into the Nigerian market in 1987, several years before deregulation, with its state of the art cellular system was unable to do business with Nigerian officials. That was at a time when Siemens was the best friends of the same technocrats.

When the Nokia Siemens Networks, NSN joint venture was mooted mid 2006, investigation into Siemens activities on issues which bordered on corruption and under-the-table deals across the world had already commenced. So the core objective of the alliance was difficult to analyse. But it went through all the same last April.

Why going burst so early? Nokia, unlike the Japanese, Marubeni[switches], Fujikura[cables] who actually withdrew from the market, refused to look away from Nigeria until it eventually got a bite of the market when 2G systems came to Nigeria in form of GSM networks and Nokia terminals ranked unequalled in the reckoning of consumers.

Meanwhile Celtel Nigeria has just signed a $130million deal with NSN to construct 4000km of Nationwide Fibre Optic backbone infrastructure.

CyberschuulNews.com to open e-gallery

CyberschuulNews.com which publishes developmental information on telecommunications has announced that it will open a gallery on the web in January 2008 to house a salad of factual information about Nigeria’s telecommunications. The announcement indicates that over 400 technical and business papers, presentations, reports, and government policy and intervention documents are already assembled while it is envisaged that another 200 may be vetted in the next few weeks. When implemented, the archive will be updated daily and would be available for access on free registration. The objective is to avail students, researchers, investors and historians information on actual record of what went into development of telecommunications in Nigeria, post deregulation. The e-gallery will complement CyberschuulNews which reviews current events to forge the overall vision of enhancing capacity building and investment into the telecommunications industry.

Who takes sanction?

With the recent observation of slight improvement in across-networks quality of service, the three mobile operators in Nigeria may after all survive the threat of sanction which the Nigerian Communications Commission says it will evoke if poor service persists. Late September, the NCC had warned each of the operators that it would use the observed key performance indicator of Traffic Channel Congestion to apportion mandatory compensation to their subscribers in the month of October. It warned further that should the compensation apply, it must be paid in terms of airtime credit to subscribers not later than day 7 of the succeeding month.

Virtually all the operators have been announcing huge investment figures for network expansion just as they take every opportunity to draw attention to desirable power sector reforms.

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New Mobile Virtual Network Operator emerges in UK

The first mobile network, or even any network at all, to be funded by Advertising may have emerged in the UK. It is, in telecom parlance, a market driven Value-added network.

Two gentlemen, Pekka Ala-Pietil and Antti hrling, told the world last week that they had been conducting research into user groups and live users to justify the investment and they felt convinced that there is business in an innovative, new media channel, providing direct access to the 16-24 year old market; enabling them to create awareness, build relationships and drive sales to this hard to reach audience. They call the MVNO Blyk.

Blyk is a mobile network for 16 to 24 year olds that is funded by advertising. The network links young people with brands they like and gives them free texts and minutes every month. Blyk was founded in 2006 and has offices in Helsinki, Finland and London, UK. The owners say they hope to move into other European markets.


Highlight, Copy and Paste

3G NETWORK SYSTEMS:
THE CHOICE & CHALLENGE FOR NIGERIA

Ladies and gentlemen,

1st things first, let’s discuss why we are where we are. We shall then recall some historical perspectives and also mention a few personal experiences.

In 1995, the NCC commissioned a study under the title of ‘Study into [Prospects of] Cellular Mobile Telecommunications Market in Nigeria’. The report of that study led to various motion-without-movement experiences between then and year 2000 when there was a modification that turned out ‘a magic’.

In the early days of Mobile Systems, there was fragmented market. Systems went by their proprietary standards and generally cared less about interoperability. There were: The American Standards, The European Standards, and The Nordic Countries Standards. Two notable realizations emerged:
One; that mobile systems thrive on economy of scale and interoperability makes business sense and two; that even poor countries could be viable markets.

Then emerged the ‘generational’ initiative as in assigning vocabulary to each stage of mobile technology development. Each generation represented an improvement in spectrum capacity usage and ITU took advantage of the global realisation and situated itself better to play its natural role. It operated in a true belief that business would be truly global and that regulators would have less problems of incompatibility to deal with. The initiative seemed good for all concerned. On top of this, it was also realised that there is money to make everywhere.

The First Generation of systems for mobile telephony was analog, circuit switched, FDMA Access technology, and it only carried voice traffic. The analog phones used in 1G were less secure and prone to interference where the signal is weak. Analog systems include AMPS [in the US], NMT [ In Nordic Countries : East Europe, Asia and Russsia ] and ETACS [in UK].

The Second Generation of mobile telephony systems, 2G, uses digital encoding. 2G networks support high bit rate voice, limited data communications and different levels of encryption. 2G networks include GSM, D-AMPS (TDMA) and CDMA. 2G networks can support SMS applications.

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) is a mobile data service available to users of GSM mobile phones. Although GSM is strictly a 2G standard, that GPRS is an enhancement of it makes it code-named a 2.5G generation of mobile phones. GPRS, which supports a wide range of bandwidths, is an efficient use of limited bandwidth and is particularly suited for sending and receiving small bursts of data, such as e-mail and Web browsing, as well as large volumes of data.

2.5G extends, an extension of if you like, 2G systems, adding features such as packet-switched connection and enhanced data rates. 2.5G networks include Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution EDGE and GPRS. These networks support WAP, MMS, SMS mobile games, search and directory.

One of the major limitations of Second Generation cellular communications systems is that data can only be transferred after a connection has been established. This is inefficient if only small amount of data is transferred, and in situations where data is transferred in bursts. 2.5G cellular systems allow a mobile station to be "always-online" for sending and receiving packet data. This allows efficient transfer of small amounts of data, without the overhead of establishing a connection for each transfer. It also efficiently supports bursty data transfers, avoiding the need to allocate capacity to a connection that cannot be reallocated by the network if the connection chooses not to use it. The two major forms of 2.5G enhancements to second-generation cellular systems are the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution (EDGE).

The Next Generation Networks
The next generation networks (NGN) would support all traffic demands. Specifically, it should deliver all the following services:
A single network must converge voice, data and video traffic, support mobility, have a very high speed switching core, must be packet based technology and must support value added services.

It is usual to refer to 3G systems as a Next Generation Network System on account of the foregoing definition. They can also be described as ITU’s IMT 2000 family because it was in the year 2000 that there was unanimous approval of the technical specifications for third generation systems under the brand IMT-2000. The spectrum between 400 MHz and 3 GHz is technically suitable for the third generation. This approval meant that for the first time, full interoperability and inter-working of mobile systems could be achieved.

What specific advantages are envisaged?
IMT-2000 offers the capability of providing value-added services and applications on the basis of a single standard. The system envisages a platform for distributing converged fixed, mobile, voice, data, Internet and multimedia services. One of its key visions is to provide seamless global roaming, enabling users to move across borders while using the same number and handset. IMT-2000 also aims to provide seamless delivery of services, over a number of media (satellite, fixed, name it…). It is expected that IMT-2000 will provide higher transmission rates: a minimum speed of 2Mbit/s for stationary or walking users, and 348 kbit/s in a moving vehicle. Second-generation systems only provide speeds ranging from 9.6 kbit/s to 28.8 kbit/s

To repeat, the often quoted major strengths of Third Generation Mobile technology is its suitability for voice, video and data services including video, video conferencing and Internet access.

For equipment vendors and manufacturers, there is universal agreement, a necessity really, that they will be flexible, affordable, compatible with existing systems and modular.

Why embrace 3G?
Considering that Nigerians have demonstrated a thirst for Broadband internet access and that so far there is still lack of broadband internet. Considering also that Digital Subscriber Line, DSL is not known to have been commonplace, NITEL went about it in a lackluster manner, while I have no much literature on a few others that claim to do it, there is a pressing need to fill the gap. And 3G may just do that according to some specialists. What is more, recent experiences show that Nigerians create opportunities on emerging technologies. Moreover, it is cheaper and quicker to roll-out 3G/WCDMA than to run communication cables to every home.

With all the above arguments some have forecast that high uptake of services in 3G is therefore expected if launched. Who knows, these may have informed the embrace of 3G by the industry regulator which is known to have issued licenses to all existing mobile service providers.

Wideband CDMA, also known as UMTS in Europe, is 3G standard for GSM in Europe, Japan and the United States. It's also the principal alternative being discussed in Asia. It supports very high-speed multimedia services such as full-motion video, Internet access and video conferencing. It uses one 5 MHz channel for both voice and data, offering data speeds up to 2 Mbps.

The Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA)
A digital wireless technology that uses a spread spectrum technique to scatter a radio signal across a wide range of frequencies. CDMA is a 2G technology.

WCDMA, a 3G technology, is based on CDMA. CDMA has multiple variants, including CDMA 1X, cdma2000, CDMA2000 1X, CDMA2000 1xEV-DO and cdmaOne.

What is possible?
All e-advantages [ e-learning, e-business, e-sports etc] Video Telephony, eMail, Location Services, instant messaging, etc High Speed Internet Access and Interactive Multimedia.

These do not come without challenges though. We should expect challenges in the areas of Licensing, infrastructure, and capacity building.

We must be conscious of some drawbacks such as the reality that users have to make completely new investment in 3G compliant terminals just as lack of access of majority to the internet may limit penetration. What about our public power condition!

Recommendations
It is hoped that the structure of 3G License fee so far supports affordability going by the enthusiasm with which the existing operators embraced their monopoly of the licenses.

It is at this stage that the often repeated need to review telecom engineering training syllabus in good time to meet current challenges is apt. I say it again.

And 4G?
4G, though not within the scope of this presentation, encourages architecture "openness". The services that 4G can offer should be such that it can be developed by any content vendor. The architecture is open as opposed to proprietary in that it allows third party vendor to run in the network. The 3G is not necessarily designed with open Application Programming Interface (API). The API in each network decided what developed services that can be used by a network operator in the network. So, 4G is an enhancement to 3G with open API for third party applications (services) developments.

End of story.


Announcement
APPLE Warns
Apple says it has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone's software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.

Apple has just released a new iPhone software update, containing many new features including the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store (www.itunes.com). Apple strongly discourages users from installing unauthorized unlocking programs on their iPhones. Users who make unauthorized modifications to the software on their iPhone violate their iPhone software license agreement and void their warranty. The permanent inability to use an iPhone due to installing unlocking software is not covered under the iPhone's warranty.

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MTN’s after hours in Republic of Benin

Now that MTN has eaten a bitter pie in Republic of Benin, it certainly will watch its back each time it takes a step forward in other [African] countries since such dictator’s-shock-treatment it received could be applicable in other climes.

It’s like an ambush was laid for MTN come to think of it. What really happened?

Benin's Telecommunications Regulation Authority (BTRA) suspended MTN and Atlantique Telecom's Moov service on July 9, on allegation that both companies had changed their names without its permission. And to return to service a new set of ‘new license fees’ was prescribed.

For starters, MTN acquired its Benin operation when it bought Lebanon-based Investcom for $5.5 billion in 2006.

At take off of squabbles, MTN and Atlantique refused to pay with MTN saying it was an illegal act as Benin authorities were acting outside their own laws. Of course the switches were off air and about 1million subscribers of both operators went without phones. MTN tried some subtle blackmail reminding government about the peoples' discomfort from the shutdown. But with President Thomas Boni Yayi, no dice.

Meanwhile two other mobile providers, Libercom and Bell Benin had paid up. Of course they were obviously not the target. Libercom is M-tel’s opposite in Benin Republic since it is a subsidiary of Benin Telecom while Bell Benin is privately owned.

Almost immediately, Nigeria’s Globacom was given a license by BTRA to commence operation and several top operatives of the firm were already in Benin for initial implementation survey.

President Thabo Mbeki stepped in and high level talks went in to save the neck of MTN.

8 weeks into the fracas, MTN capitulated by which time it had been asked to pay a whopping $620million. It was Benin telecoms authorities who said, last week, that the MTN Group has accepted the conditions laid out in the new fees structure. True?

What happens next? Is the sun setting at dawn for MTN at its so-called strategic market? We wait and see.

What is bad is bad. What happened in Benin is an unfair action which may be in waiting for other uses by which time people would know it is an ugly side of dictatorship. When such things happen to multinationals which people grind axe with rightly or wrongly, it is often passed for ‘one of those things’ until when it happens to ‘a member of the family’.


Africa Telecom X-rayed

Intro
In a recent commissioned report, The International Telecommunications Union, ITU appears not impressed by progress of telecom development in developing economies blaming the problem on inappropriate regulation. It, however, identified four African countries [Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania] which have done fairly well with regard to adopting a technology neutral regime of regulation. Considering that Africa is home to a large number of developing economies, the report might as well be painting the Africa picture.

In another breadth, the organization has hailed ICT development in Africa saying it has built a new generation of entrepreneurs, the booming of new technologies, the design and implementation of new business models and initiatives.

These are not conflicting positions come to think of it. It is just that when you choose to look at a coin you will see the side you are looking at. And if you choose to look at a side at one time and report, then you may be saying different things at different times. It is the audience that needs to be careful on how it understands the stories.

ICTs in Africa: a Continent on the Move

ITU has just announced its sixth Regional Event for Africa, ITU TELECOM AFRICA 2008, to be held in Cairo, Egypt, from 12-15 May 2008.

During ITU TELECOM AFRICA 2004, speakers and delegates of the Forum noted that following the global telecommunication and information and communication technology (ICT) industry downturn of the late 1990’s, the industry was rapidly recovering, thus providing a new window of opportunity for the African continent. Leaders who gathered at the event agreed that there was a huge potential for growth in the ICT sector and that emerging economies and developing countries now had the potential to leapfrog the technology gap, thanks in particular to the rapid deployment of wireless communications.

Three years later, these predictions have been confirmed, not only in the ICT sector but also in many other aspects of the African economy. With a new generation of entrepreneurs, the booming of new technologies, the design and implementation of new business models and initiatives, Africa is becoming a competitive and exciting market, and in some cases, a pioneer of new and far-reaching practices.

The adoption of a new ICT culture by the younger generation has changed the way Africa is developing; from its image, its cultural scene or its social development, to its perception of the world and of its own role in the future.

Such fundamental changes not only offer the opportunity to develop new commercial approaches. They also challenge the way policies are established, regulations are developed and applied, and markets are governed to ensure transparency and smooth development.

In view of the extraordinary wave of change on the continent, the Forum at ITU TELECOM AFRICA 2008 will focus on innovation. The ITU TELECOM Forum Committee will consider all proposals discussing really innovative approaches in the fields of technology, regulation, policy, business models, economy, finance, agriculture, development, culture, health, life and society, up to the changes and challenges witnessed on the African continent.

Africa is basing its growth on a new generation of entrepreneurs and leaders, waiving the traditional and old-fashioned models.

ITU is saying that if you consider that you are up to this challenge, you should submit a proposal to the Forum Committee.


Cybreschuul/Cathybrite synergy program hailed

Although at 28 participants, attendance at the August 24/25 session of the Cyberschuul/Cathybrite re-orientation program was considered low, there was consensus among participants that the concern of the course designers is real and the content of training is adequate. Some of the common problems namely: fundamental problem of dysfunctional education, poor understanding of industry requirements, bad curriculum vitae presentation and abrasive application structure which the workshop addressed made a good impact on those who received the training. Not a few expressed amazement at the incorrectness of the things they have always done.

There was also a consensus that the program be extended to more people. The Institute is therefore holding another session on November 30 and December 1, 2007, this time avoiding a clash with the Lagos State environmental sanitation exercise as in the last date. [Please see advert elsewhere on this bulletin and also at www.cyberschuulnews.com ] at the same venue.

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Development in Technology:
‘e’ is fast transforming to ‘i’

It is amazing the way things are changing. Faster than all predictions and by the time it has finished with us, everybody’s name will become his/her phone number. Bet you can’t wait for that to happen to you and I.

When we said ‘e’ we actually meant the application of The Internet dressed in the magic word ‘electronic’. Really it has gone beyond that and it is matching on. When The Internet was first mentioned publicly in Nigeria in 1995 what we said was that it was a purely data phenomenon. We said it did not relate to voice. As research eventually revealed, the VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol, was born. Then the IP telephony. Now the iPhone. We expect the i-industry and ultimately the i-society.

The issue really is that there is a world of difference between VoIP and IP telephony. These two terms are used frequently interchangeably but they are in fact different. VoIP describes the actual method of transmitting voice over an IP network while IP telephony describes telephony devices that use IP as the native transport for voice and call signaling. IP telephony needs VoIP to send calls over the network but VoIP does not need IP telephony.

IP telephony is what will change the ‘e’ to the ‘i’. It has started with the iPod which really might just have been a product name but certainly coined advisedly. Now iPhone. Both are championed by Apple the world’s best in this game. Amazingly, the iPhone which went on the shelf on June 29 is reported to have sold I million units.

We have a price to pay though: a total review of our development process starting with what we call education.

Above is taken from a speech at Ijebu-Ode delivered by Titi Omo-Ettu, a Lagos based telecom engineer

Convergence or Divergence?

Convergence is not about technology or even media. It is a revolution on what society is and how it is structured.

This is according to Matthew Buckland, GM of Mail & Guardian Online, speaking during a debate on media convergence, at the 11th Highway Africa conference, held in Grahamstown, last week.

“Convergence represents a flattening of hierarchies, which may have big implications for society,” he said, citing revenue growth in the bloggersphere as an example of new media developments.

According to Buckland, these concepts are being driven by the changing attitudes of media consumers. “Readers are no longer letter-writers, but media owners in their own right and the challenge for convergence is to understand this new class of intelligent reader.”

He added that it represents a new form of democracy where the consumer is given a platform for reader response and media creation.

Cellular inroads
The Internet has created many opportunities for media to present information in new ways, and is one of the drivers for convergence of media, said Arrie Rossouw, editorial director of 24.com, during the debate.

“We can now cover all platforms of media, from TV to book publishing, and place it online. Thanks to digitisation, we can now mash up this content.”

He noted that to remain competitive, newspapers need to start factoring in the cost of providing online, or converged content. “If newspapers don't converge, they will fall away.”

Rossouw added the cellphone is the most exciting platform emerging as a medium of news dissemination. By 2010, the continent could expect 400 million mobile handsets, 70% of which will be able to access online content, he said. “That is exactly the kind of inroads that this technology will make, which will allow us to reach a whole new audience.”

Buckland agreed: “I foresee a time in the future when cellphones will be so cheap that they will be given away and connectivity will be so fast. A woman in a rural area will be able to watch a video news insert on cellphone regardless of literacy.”

Candice Jones, ITweb Journalist reported the above for ITweb at www.itweb.co.za

OPINION
The Beauty of Due Process in Telecoms and IT Regulation

You can’t win all the time.

A time comes when the winning horse gets detoured, even despised, sometimes by its owner.
That has been the burden of winners. Ask the guy with the winning charm – Bill Clinton. When his charismatic appeal seemed to have peaked in American and World politics, some guys who could not stand his popularity found a trap in Monica Lewinski trap. And trust, the guy fell for it.

Back home, there was this gentleman corp, Fidelis Oyakhilome who was first sent to Rivers State as Military Governor. He proved outstanding and received avalanche of accolades. His popularity took him to another tough job – the drug czar as head of NDLEA. One thing led to another and he came down with a bang! Unlike Bill, he did not swim out.

What stood out on the administrative acumen of these two case studies is that both guys are due process people, who employed due process for a good measure. Sometimes, some due process adherents bow out before their time. In such cases, they go with their integrity untouched but sometimes unfulfilled. Those who stick to it sometimes run a huge risk in our clime but must withstand the vagaries of hate and blackmail.

This is where a reference to the telecommunications success in Nigeria becomes apt and is in many ways attributable to the adherence of the Nigerian Communications Commission to due process and rule of law. And ironically it is also what has made those who are crying ‘hark them down’ are twisting to push their arguments.

But for those who have studied the NCC very closely, the commission has entrenched a tradition – a tradition of sticking to due process.

This is what some analysts have christened the study-discuss-review-launch model of regulation. The Commission, since inception, has stuck to four-stage regulatory interventions. A careful analysis presents the first stage as the study-the-subject stage where it commissions consultants to closely study a subject after which it uses the result of study to moderate a stakeholders’ discussion. Thereafter it takes the subject to the nitty-gritty review mill of its own in house executives after which it launches when all results indicate a positive move. With this, it has earned industry partnership and participation and saved itself, may just be all of us, from possible litigations that would have tasked the Nigerian legal system beyond its limits and our march necessarily punctuated. Of course litigations have their ways of retarding industrial march.

Come to think of it. Discount Strive Masiyiwa's effort, you really can count on fingers the quantity of hardcore litigations since deregulation. The few that were commenced eventually got withdrawn. Believe it, due process has its merits!

So, there many good sides to sticking to due process including envy and hate. Sometimes they come inform of undue radicalism. Yet, some are mere campaigns made to suit patronage objectives. In many cases the proponents have no business knowing the major differences in Quality of Service, Interconnections, and Collocation.

But time is here to encourage the Commission to continue on the good path of due process rather than succumb to the tantrums of its detractors.


NEWS
MTC changes name to Zain:
Retains Celtel for African operations

MTC group which bought over Nigeria’s VMobile in 2006 and changed its name to Celtel announced recently that it has changed its group Name to Zain but it will continue to operate in Africa as Celtel. Maybe at least for some time.

Apart from the master corporate brand which has been changed to Zain, other MTC Group operations in the Middle East and the Sudan have been rebranded as Zain.

MTC recently obtained a license to operate the third Mobile telecommunications service in the Kingdom of Suadi Arabia and it hopes to roll out early in 2008. Of course operating as Zain.

M-tel gets shut down threat

It was the Nigerian Tribune which did the story and we merely followed up on it. Tribune reported [September 19, 2007] that a top shot of Transcorp, one Partric Okigbo who is in charge of its treasury threatened to sack Mtel workers enmass if they kept pressing demand for their unpaid wages. At a negotiating table where Patrick lead the Transcorp Team to trade terms with the Staff Union of Mtel workers, those who were at the meeting said Patrick flared up when the demand for unpaid salary and allowances was becoming irritating to him and he told them his ‘conglomerate’ could lock up the whole place for the next six months to give room for the proper restructuring and “we would not lose anything by taking such a step”.

It is not as if the speech or the speaker is any big deal. But for a ‘conglomerate’ whose Group Managing Director said specializes in buying over sick companies, loosing one's temperament on such issues as we all know what wages are takes a lot away from those who are smart at getting a distressed company out of the sick bay. What were they doing since the last six months when the company was shut down?

Of course the chap was only boasting his way through but his action shows what to expect from this Transcorp-NITEL-Mtel thing.

The evil that men do lives after them.
 
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Improper telecom regulation is bane of developing economies
Report says Information Society favours technology neutrality in regulation.

Regulation, not technology or investment, is holding back telecommunications development in countries that are home to more than three-quarters of the world’s population, according to a new report by the International Telecommunication Union, ITU, released last week. The report says this could threaten emergence of a global information society.

According to the report, new telecommunications technologies and the opportunities they bring are available to developing countries at an unprecedented level and even the investment funds are available to pay for them. What is, however, all-too-often lacking is the right regulatory framework to support development.

Developing countries that seem to have done well include Nigeria, Kenya, Mali, and Tanzania. That may mean that 146 other developing countries may not have impressed the authors of the report since 150 of the ITU’s 191 member states are classified as developing countries with 50 of these classified as least developed countries of the world.

The report is almost an updated review of what Sir Maitland and his Committee pronounced in 1984 when their report, The Missing Link, admonished developing countries to liberalize and deregulate telecommunications. It took several years before the earliest of the developing countries embraced the admonition.

Nigeria deregulated in 1993 and observed a technology neutral regulatory regime in practice almost immediately but only in year 2000 by pronouncement.

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MUBADALA gets operating Partner for Nigeria:
May roll out in 2008

United Arab Emirate’s Mubadala Development Company may soon approach the Nigerian Communications Commission with an operation plan for the issuance of an operating license if it has not done so already. The Company which earned a spectrum allocation on mono-selection directly from the immediate past government in Nigeria is believed to have signed an operating deal with Etisalat.

If the plan sails through, Mubadala operating as Etisalat will be the fifth mobile service provider in Nigeria and a strong fixed service provider as well going by its huge investment of US$400million into the license.

Mubadala may be divesting almost a third of its shares to Nigerian investors in the long run. Analysts predict that the entry of Mubadala may not pose any bellyaches to the existing players the way Globacom came to change the equations of the forerunners.

Convergence:
Even telephone subscriber identification numbers may converge.

Nigeria appears set to take total advantage of convergence, notable fallout of digital technology in information systems, as it heads for a radical National Numbering Plan. A workshop at which on going works between the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC and the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, would be discussed has been slated for October 22 – 25 in Abuja.

Number portability, a new industry lexicon, which is said to mean that a telephone subscriber can move his telephone identification number form one network to the other. It may just be implemented before the year ends. Its promoters, Nigeria’s regulatory authorities, claim that a telephone user may move from one network provider to the other without loosing its identification number.


WITFOR steps out

The IFIP World IT Forum (WITFOR) contributes to taking the World Summit on the Information Society's (WSIS) Plan of Action a step forward and into helping developing countries to achieve the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). WITFOR investigates successful, sustainable ICT strategies in developing countries and examines different initiatives and projects on effective, context sensitive development and use of ICT applications. This work is conducted in eight thematic commissions and the result of this preparatory work is presented as policies, initiatives and best practices every second year in the WITFOR conference, organized by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) in co-operation with its member societies and local governments in developing countries.


Industry consolidation:
Nigeria Telecom industry may be one to watch

Mergers, buy-overs and take-overs are current strategies through which distress in telecommunications markets are controlled. Analysts say while significant buy-overs have taken place in recent times in the Nigerian market, more may even be expected in the next few years.

One of the most successful buyoffs in Nigeria had been the MTN and VGC Communications in which the former staked close to US$65million for a 100% takeover. VGC had been a solid company from day one and it made a success of its fibre-optic backbone on which its fixed wired services sit. Fine management and smart investment decision in 2002, when it reengineered its network bailed it out of early flight into technology induced problem and the move paid off. It is one buy over in which no job loss was recorded.
 
100 days of telecommunications under President Yar’Adua

One hundred days down the road, four issues should form the major focus of analysis, namely; the due process, dwindling quality of service, challenging public power supply and confronting politics’ major characteristics.

A unique characterization of the 100 days of telecommunications under President Yar’Adua, is his bold statement, if not an emphasis, on his seriousness with due process. Due process has hallmarked the success of the telecommunications industry in Nigeria in the past few years, essentially arising from the posture of the regulatory authority and not really from the direct policy thrust of the central administration.

Unlike his predecessor who, early in his tenure, sacked some Commissioners of NCC without explanations even against the prescription of the law that set it up, President Yar’Adua’s refusal to dance to the bodytalk of his fellow politicians who traditionally see political patronage as an art in governance regardless of what harm they may do to the economy in the process, may be an issue to watch. This has given a fillip to the desired protection of the independence of the telecoms regulator as envisaged in the Telecommunications Act 2003.

Proof! The President’s inauguration coincided with the time when quality of mobile services had dipped considerably. Subscribers were at daggers drawn with the operators. It was, perhaps, the most challenging experience of the Commission which had actually been reading the riot act to the operators, albeit in slow pace, ostensibly in observance of the stipulations of the Telecoms Act. Just then some politicians capitalized on the situation to cast aspersions on the Commission. The operators appeared to have no quick fix solutions beyond promises of expansion of their networks to reduce congestion. One had expected the operators would concede to re-ordering their attention to technical aspect of their business in the manner they had paid attention to their marketing activities. But they preferred to put all the blame on poor public power supply and vandalism.

The new House of Representatives indeed set up an ad hoc committee on quality of service, held various public hearing sessions on the matter, and as it is characteristic of politicians to chase solutions to problems by travelling round the world, were reported to have visited South Africa and Ghana with a view to finding solution to Nigeria’s problems. No dice, so far.

The dust raised by quality of service was yet to settle when another controversy arose with the refusal of the Nigerian Communications Satellite Ltd, bidding for a last mile solution license by the NCC. It was a controversy that set two Ministers – the Minister of Information and Communications and that of Science and Technology to work hours after they were sworn in by Mr. President. The controversy came with a lot of information and misinformation that are capable of confusing even the most diligent President!

Perhaps, the situation provided a good opportunity for President Yar’Adua to showcase his inert desire for due process when he directed that NigComSat be privatized as a first step. Under a charged telecoms environment such as we have witnessed in the past 100 days, a new President that is lacking in focus would have been distracted by sentiments and comments of various brands of interest in the matter. But the man remained calm and took a decision that gave hope that he could be trusted for a right decision. He was also bold enough to discountenance an approval, apparently misrepresented, purportedly given to NigComSat by his predecessor when he saw that that action was lacking in due process. That sublime act of saying and proving that he can live with the rule of law has hit the right cords in the future of telecommunications development in this administration.

The period under review is also eventful in income generation with the auctioning of 3G spectrum in which $450 Million was realized just before the regime assumed office. Another N400 Million was raked in from Visa Communications as fee from spectrum allocation. Under the former dispensation, such funds were shared among the Federal, State and Local Government administrations as against logical projections that it would be used to expand telecoms infrastructures in the country. President Yar’Adua has remarkably been silent over how these funds would be used. It is hoped he would also depart from the style of his predecessor and apply these funds for more proper use, especially in the current plans to extend telecoms services to the rural locations of the country.

Like many other aspects of the economy, telecommunications was a marooned victim of the erratic power situation in which there had been motion without movement. Many telecom operators have found alibi in the debilitating power supply situation to cover their poor performance.

On assumption of office, President Yar’Adua actually pledged a state of emergency on the power sector although it may not be known yet what this means in real terms. Nothing significant seems to have come out of the Presidency that suggests solution is in sight. Since power supply is intertwined with telecommunications services delivery, there would be no kudos to Mr. President yet on this score! In so far as the power problem is not resolved, it would continue to haunt the march in the telecoms sector.

Overall, the President has a record of good performance in the telecommunications industry in his 100 days largely for standing firm on due process and inspiring confidence by protecting the independence of the industry regulator, and sustaining the stability enjoyed in the management of the nation’s telecoms industry.

In the next one hundred days, the President may just have begun to ask questions on how Nigerians in rural communities would be served and why his directive on Nigcomsat should not apply to the other government companies which are still purporting to be in commercial telecommunications business. He may also be pushing for the unfinished business of truly harmonising the telecommunications and ICT sector which his predecessor handled rather brashly.

Agreed. Nigerians forget very easily. It is however doubtful if this rather pleasant takeoff has made them to forget the jibiti manner in which the fine man came to power.
 

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YAHOO GIVES E-MAIL TEXTING CAPABILITY

Yahoo Mail said on Monday that it thinks there's more to life than just sending e-mail.
On Monday, Yahoo expands the Web mail service into a social communication tool by adding the ability to send text messages to cellphones directly from e-mail.

It has also tweaked the interface to make it easier for people to go back and forth between e-mail, instant messaging and text messaging.

Yahoo dominates the domestic Web mail market in the US, with 83 million U.S. users in July, according to researcher ComScore Media Metrix while CyberschuulNews has 62% of its 35,331 subscribers as yahoo users.

OPINION
THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF NIGERIAN TELECOMS UNDER YAR’ADUA
By
Reuben Muoka

This month, August, marks the sixth anniversary of the acclaimed revolution in the Nigerian telecoms sector, after some fifty years of pursuing the shadow during which an estimated US$6 Billion was lost in the management and mismanagement of the national career, NITEL.

It was in August 2001 that mobile phone operators who won licenses under the novel frequency spectrum auction introduced by the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, began commercial services. In six years, we are no longer talking about GSM alone but an addition of comprehensive array of telecoms and IT services, products and services that include CDMA fixed and wireless telephony, Broadband services, VOIP, ubiquitous Internet Services, mobile Internet, huge fibre optics and satellite transmission systems, online banking services like Asynchronous Transfer Mode, ATM, and a host of other value added services driven by telecommunications.

Against this background, and in an attempt to be fair to history, we must credit this success to the Nigeria’s telecoms reformists, Engr. Ernest Ndukwe and his team, at the NCC.

Leveraging FDI with transparency
The unpredictable yield of the transparent auction in 2001, when Nigeria had some 500,000 subscribers, is today’s celebration of some 40 Million phone subscribers, a record that puts Nigeria in the league of the fastest growing telecoms economy of the world. This super image is complemented by inflow of foreign direct investment, FDI, of estimated $US10 Billion in the sector within the past six years. Total investments in the sector now stand at some US$20 Billion making telecoms the darling business of any investor in Nigeria. In terms of international relations, it must be emphasized that the transparency that accompanied the frequency auction in Nigeria, was the first item that gave the Obasanjo administration the most tangible, if not the most significant positive international image, and also forced the attention of the global community to an emerging democracy with a focus for economic reforms.

Advantage of due process and courage
Since 2001, NCC has implemented participatory and robust regulatory strategies and undertaken courageous actions and decisions, with unprecedented results that have encouraged investors within and outside Nigeria to show appreciation of the potentials of the sector. Today, the NCC is rated alongside the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, and NAFDAC as agencies of government where the nation can go to sleep in full confidence that positive and courageous decisions are taken as appropriate, as and at when due, and with successful results predictable.

Some have attributed the success rating of Engr Ndukwe and his team to his business mindedness, and his stickler dispositions to due process. The independence offered the Commission by the Telecoms Act 2003, and support from the focused and courageous Ahmed Joda-led Board of Commissioners, have also contributed. This ideal must have attracted President Yar’Adua who recently directed the privatization of NigComsat as an aftermath of NCC’s refusal to issue it license for flouting due process.

Harvesting gains of efficiency and investor confidence
The NCC has so far exhibited appreciable dexterity in wining the investor’s confidence. The recent acquisition of 75 per cent of a local fixed wireless operator, Multilinks Telecoms Ltd, for US$280 Million, by a global player, Telkom South Africa, which has announced plans to inject US$1 Billion into the company, adds to demonstrate investor confidence in Nigeria. Apart from huge revenues secured though transparent frequency auctions, the mobile phone handset marketing is now valued at some US$10 Billion.
In June 2007, frequencies for 3G services were won by four operators, MTN, Celtel, Globacom and Alhieri Engineering which paid US$150 Million each and in January 2007, Mubadala, a United Arab Emirate company, paid US$400 Million for GSM license slot, indicating increasing investor value for the country.
Before 2001, Nigerian banks had nothing to do with telecommunications and telecoms investment portfolios. But since the regulatory environment opened a new vista of business where transparency and stability are assured, none of the banks now do without a telecoms desk. Revenues from telecoms business can no longer be ignored as the banks as also compete to introduce telecoms driven products and services in Nigeria.
Suddenly, 40 million Nigerians have a choice. Even with the critical quality of services issues threatening the tranquillity of the sector, many Nigerians have not allowed it to downplay or overshadow the overall gains in the sector and the hope to resolve this temporal problem with operators expanding their networks.
The NCC has made very significant contributions to the national economic growth, with the provision of direct and indirect employment since 2001.

Managing the tariff war
Tariff management is where the NCC has made a futuristic inroad by targeting interconnect rates in driving the prices down as against the popular and too simplistic approach of dictating prices. This has led to the current rates of N11.32K per minute uniform rates, down from about N18.50K at inception. Consequently, operators were forced to reduce prices from some N50 per minute at launch of GSM in 2001 to about N19 per minute in some service category in GSM networks, and N15 per minute in CDMA networks. Another round of adjustment is expected in 2008 and operators are braving for it.
The cost of SMS, which was N15 about 2001, has come to some N5 per text while international call charges which hovered at average N150 per minute in 2001 have come to as cheap as N12 per minute in some CDMA networks.

A win for rural telecoms?
Perhaps, the greatest tool in the hands of government, whish needs more encouragement is the ongoing development-oriented citizen’s empowerment initiatives by the Commission, like the Universal Service Provision Fund, USPF, and Wire Nigeria (WIN) project. Both projects are complementary while partnering the private sector in taking telephony and IT-based services to rural and underserved communities. The WIN project has additional value in providing backbone telecommunications infrastructure to the Nigerian rural communities, to address the tasking quality of service issues and ensure adequate communications between the rural and urban communities. The current models applied in the implementation of these two programmes appear to be water tight with investors, who logically shy away from investing in rural areas because of its slow and low return on investments, accepting the carrots being dangled by the NCC.
This is one area that would need a full focus because it has unquantifiable multiplier effect, and it would do this government a lot of good to lay a claim to the profound turnaround of rural communications which these projects would bring.

Conclusion
Applying a holistic view, it would be concluded that a regulatory stability that provides robust backbone for growth, an efficient management of the national scarce resource called frequency spectrum, and a regulatory process that have won the heart and confidence of investors, are some of the crucial gifts that the current NCC is bringing to the table of Yar’Adua’s government. How the government manages and sustains these gains would be subject of history in the future.

Reuben Muoka, former Deputy Communications Editor of Vanguard Newspapers, is a Telecoms Analyst.


CALL ON POLITICIANS NOT TO REVERSE RECENT GAINS IN TELECOMMUNICATIONS DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA
by
Adeleke Adelaja

Something very exciting about some Nigerian politicians is that they like to present themselves as patriots. Regardless of what Nigerians know about many of them and their antecedents, it is not uncommon for them to take control of any situation and start sermonizing about patriotism.

The guys in the lower House of National Assembly have been playing theater with telecommunications in recent times. The Speaker while she was signing off to go for a holiday [they came in only on May 29 under a thoroughly discredited election process and they consider themselves already deserving of a holiday paid for by the state] and a birthday bash here in United States of America left words that the House Committee on telecommunications should do no little battle with telecom service providers because they have been cheating Nigerians. They talk like ‘we are the representatives of Nigerians and we cannot fold our arms and let them be cheated by GSM Operators’. Good talk you would say!

There is a fellow called Leo Ogo [or Ogor] who has been speaking for an ad-hoc committee of the House on poor telecommunications services. The fellow pushes an agenda which either shows crass opportunism, and a display of uncommon ignorance of the subject he is superintending or he is just working blindly for a dirty project. He is the kind of politician who has written laws about what price Nigerians should pay for services and he is only working towards crafting the 'theretofore' of putting them together on air. Regrettably, he is low on information.

They invited service providers to talk down on them in the name of oversight functions and end up making Nigerians laughing a stock in international discourse. Chances are that very soon they will either confuse themselves and everybody else or get settled by those they pretend to be intimidating and abandon Nigerians with their problems. If the Mobile operators turn round to land free recharge cards on the laps of these singing politicians, it would only just be a repeat of what happened to those who were there in the last dispensation. Remember?

Meanwhile the madam-speaker who set up the tough-talking committee is in the news for refurbishing her official residence with a scandalous N628million. Of course the figures are being denied by her agents while the woman has been keeping ‘babaically’ quiet. Perhaps she too, like her friend, does not read Nigerian newspapers.

One agent of the lady said the figure in respect of the official residence of the speaker could not be more than N230million. Even at that in a country where secondary schools do not have reagents in chemistry laboratories for reason of lack of fund, it is amazing how those folks think they will construct a Nigeria that can produce future scientists if things go the way they drive them.

Going by the way they are carrying on, chances are that they destroy all the gains the country made in telecommunications.

Adeleke Adelaja lives in Long Island

CyberschuulNews 247

Respite from NIGCOMSAT quibbles,
Thumbs up for President Yar’Adua

Good Decision! You would almost shout as the Yar’Adua’s regime is proving daily by helping Nigerians recover from the unpopular decisions of the previous regime.

The Yar’Adua directive approving immediate privatization of NIGCOMSAT Ltd., as conveyed by the Information and Communications Minister, Mr. John Odey, after Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council Meeting, has put paid to many quibbles. According to him, “The real objective of launching Nigcomsat 1 is to open the sector and later privatise it. Government has just directed the Ministry to commence action through the BPE for its [Nigcomsat Ltd.] privatisation. If it is privatised, thereafter, the company can now request for license and they may be granted to run other services. The privatization will not leave government with majority shares.” [Vanguard August 16, 2007]

That has brought to a close, the needless media war which the guys in charge at Nigcomsat Ltd have engaged with everybody, including its more focused and fearless sister agency, on what would otherwise, have been a laudable project of putting a satellite in space.

Let’s hope the bad press which NIGCOMSAT Ltd invited to itself does not affect its belated privatisation. We would hope that the BPE whose record of privatisation is not exciting does this job with utmost dispatch and sincerity and that NIGCOMSAT has not unduly swollen its head as a government company as investors are wont to shy away from government business, moreso one enmeshed in controversy.

With the level of controversy generated by its immature management, the least international investors would require is that those who contrived this unnecessary controversy at NIGCOMSAT to take an exit before they sit down for serious discussions.

It will be a pleasant surprise if Nigeria comes clean with some profit out of the good money spent on Nigcomsat Ltd, or even the Nigcomsat-1 project as a whole if global reaction to issues like this is anything to go by.

It would not be the first of its kind though. Aerostat Balloon Project, Trans-Nigeria Coaxial Cable Transmission project, Rural Telephony Project, were but only a few of several of similar major investments which Nigeria has been railroaded in the deceptive search for providing cheap service to rural populace. Things only dived for the worse when strategic thinking in Nigeria started going Chinese.

The latest adventure, the hollowness is so visible when a government agency has to take newspaper advertorials, in almost all the papers in the land, asking the public to intervene in its business problems with another government agency. Blasphemy!!

Nigcomsat guys said in their advertorial that it is being opposed because “its full operation is rooted in the fact that it is deploying state-of-the-art facilities to offer world class services at cheaper rates". It is good if they were mischievous but bad if they are ignorant.

Just last week, Director General of South Africa’s Department of Communications, Lyndall Shope-Mafole announced that The NEPAD Broadband Infrastructure Network (NBIN) will lay its own East African undersea cable, despite two commercial ventures already on the marks to go. That statement did not give consideration to Nigcomsat’s existence. It dwelt on Fibre Optics, the preferred system for transmission of this age. Put that against Nigcomsat's 'business plan' of selling bandwidth to 'other African countries'.

In East Africa, two commercial cables are being planned. The East African Submarine Cable System (Eassy) - is a consortium of African and several international telecommunications operators, including SA's Telkom and the UK's BT. This cable should stretch for about 9 000km along the coastline and connect every seaboard country and is currently on the final stages of raising the estimated $230 million it needs for construction and it expects to be operational in late 2009, with an initial capacity of 340GB. The Nepad Broadband Infrastructure Network falls under the e-Africa Commission of the African Union and consists of a terrestrial phase, running from SA through Zimbabwe to Rwanda and, possibly, an undersea system as well.

The second would stretch about 12,000km along the East Coast and onto the Middle East and Europe , and has a planned capacity of 1.2TB. It is being laid by the Seacom private equity venture. Surveying for this cable has started and its route will encompass SA and its neighbouring countries. Seacom has not revealed details of its capital raising, but The Blackstone Group, the world's largest private equity firm, is behind the project.

Here in West Africa, Globalstar, a satellite company which has spent years on researching the commercial potentials in Nigeria and West Africa has already been on plans to take service into rural Nigeria on commercial basis. Government agencies do not have a record of such research and development strategies that can deliver affordable services in the rural areas the way those at Nigcomsat have been posturing. This is why Nigcomsat have had a disastrous outing.

This is what happens when foreigners prop up politically oriented civil servants, and present them as private investor models. It is also for the same reason that no less than six recommendations have been made for the privatization of NIGCOMSAT by committees of experts, set up by government itself, when it was discovered that it was registered against good advice, but the same government has been made to sit on those recommendations until this crisis point.

At least, this would serve as a lesson to some other government agencies who presume that they can simply deceive the public by making impossible promises, go ahead to waste our resources and go scot-free as ever.

It is thumps for President Yar’Adua. For Yar’Adua to have shown that the ugly indecision and abuse of due process of the past is gone, at least for now is something to cheer.


CyberschuulNews 247

A SEARCH FOR DOMINANT OPERATORS COMMENCES

There is this saying in 'telecommunications communities' that once the Dominant Operator is determined, all problems are solved. Mischievous at best, incorrect of course, it graphically captures the fact of a big relief for those who settle dispute among operators and service providers when hierarchy and dominance in the market become either obvious or defined. That is why there had been a persistent call on the telecom regulator in Nigeria to determine and publish who Dominant Operators are.

Now NCC came up on its website a few days ago to say that it has set at a race to determine who dominant operators are by hiring Consultants to conduct a study, prescribe due definitions and state who is who. The Commission also went ahead to invite submission from all stakeholders on identifying specific markets and instances of anti-competitive conducts.

A good race. One of the from-one-issue-to-the-other types. If it were athletics, they would call it relay-race.


EMERGING SOON: MVNO’s
Telecom Analysts call on NCC to license them

A discussion group, hosted by The Cyberschuul, on the subject ‘Obasanjo years in telecommunications’ identified the need that the Nigerian Communications Commission hopefully commences to license Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) in due course if it has not done so already, notwithstanding the ongoing impasse of Mobile operators whose apparent lack of capacity to contain their current network pressures has been on show.

An MVNO is an operator providing mobile services to customers through interconnection with and access to the radio access network of a mobile operator. It is usual for MVNO’s to compete at the same level as the service provision arm of a mobile operator, but without their own allocation of spectrum and their own radio access networks.

Unlike mobile operators, MVNOs do not require assignment of radio frequencies. There are therefore no restrictions on the number of MVNO licences to be issued due to spectrum availability. It is one of the several win-win market strategies of telecommunications.


Opinion
iPhone: Game Changer?
by
Keith Willetts

After unprecedented hype and fanfare, the iPhone's release in the U.S. really has caught the markets' attention. It could have fallen on its face, but almost a million people have so far paid upwards of $500 for it. Are these customers flocking to the iPhone just to take advantage of the underlying mobile network? Of course not. In this very high-profile case, the phone itself was the major driving force, and to be blunt, the network was an afterthought. Clearly, Apple is using its cachet to get potential carrier partners and customers worked up.

So it should come as no surprise then to learn that despite fairly severe restrictions imposed by Apple on the carriers that will carry the iPhone, the providers are still eager to sign up. It's well known that Apple placed very rigid terms and conditions prior to signing a deal for exclusive U.S. rights to the iPhone. For example, they won't allow discounts on the phone, they can't subsidize the cost of the phone, and they can't create any bundled offerings involving the phone. This is the first time that such stringent conditions have ever been placed on a U.S. mobile operator. But it gets even more interesting. In addition to imposing some pretty hard commercial terms on its phones, it's been widely reported by the mainstream business and technology press around the world that Apple is also demanding a cut of service provider's customer revenues associated with the iPhone!

The cheapest iPhone service plan costs $65 a month, and while we have no way of knowing what percentage Apple may see, you can bet it adds up to a significant chunk of change that could be heavily supplemented by tie-revenues from mobile access to iTunes. It's a tough deal for operators, no doubt, and they will have to make up that loss of revenue—presumably banking on significantly increasing volumes. That will probably lead to coming up with clever ways of binding the iPhone and its service even more tightly together.

While the iPhone sinks its claws into the U.S., reports indicate that Canada and Europe are next up with releases timed for the end of 2007. If the rumors are true, and Apple is indeed demanding a slice of revenues in addition to charging customers full price for the handsets themselves, you can bet these conditions will carry over to other parts of the world. And if service providers balk at the terms, Apple can simply move onto another provider.

taken from http://www.telecommagazine.com/

SYNERGY:
CYBERSCHUUL AND CATHYBRITE JOIN FORCES TO BUILD CAPACITY IN NIGERIANS.

The Cyberschuul, a Lagos based telecommunications training Institute, has announced a synergy program between it and Cathybrite Associates, a UK based bodyshop consultancy which services select industries, to improve available human resource capacity virtually from cradle. Ms Cathy Omen Brite, ceo of Cathybrite Associates told the build-up story to an audience in Abuja. In her words ‘Sometime in 2006 we placed an advert in CyberschuulNews which we knew had a wide Nigerian audience to source for experts for our Nigerian client. Few hours after the magazine went on the internet we started receiving applications in torrents and it was amazing how many people were asking for the advertised positions. In one day we had received a few hundreds of applications. Unfortunately almost all the applications had not much content, irrelevant to our needs, and generally poor in presentation. After reading 50 applications we stopped reading and decided we would not go on again and we prevailed on the magazine to withdraw the advert.

We later had useful discussion with the guys who were behind the magazine and who in fact had been building capacity and it was amazing the useful suggestions they made in correcting the situation rather than running away from it. Somehow people seem not to have learnt what they should have learnt in school and some guy somewhere has to do that. That is why we are pleased to be a part of what has now emerged as a synergy and we are trying our hands at making the best of it in spite of all the difficulties. I agree with my friend ‘Titi’ who said “problems must be confronted, not avoided” I am pleased to be part of this confrontation….’

The first session of molding the orientation of job seekers who are keen on working in telecommunications, oil and gas industries has been scheduled for the University of Lagos campus on August 24 and 25. Thereafter, they will be prepared to have a fine industry focused mind and prepared to ask for job placement with a high degree of confidence.

The Institute says it will host the workshop only in Lagos. It however will be willing to consider brokers who may want to host it at other locations by merely hiring its services to deliver the content.

If it does, the institute will be re-living the story of its forerunners who actually pioneered public awareness training workshops on internet application in 1996 when several of today's players in the industry were sensitized on the subject matter at the same University of Lagos venue.

MINISTERS ORDER FEUDING AGENCIES TO STOP MEDIA WAR.
NIGCOMSAT LTD MAY NOT GET AN OPERATING LICENSE AFTER ALL.
There are indications that the Minister of Science and Technology and his [her?] counterpart in the Ministry of Information and Communications have met and instructed Nigcomsat Ltd to stop further media campaign over its disagreement with the Nigerian Communications Commission. The Commission had refused to grant an operating license to the government owned Nigcomsat Ltd on the premise that such license would negate the objective of privatization.

Chances are that the Ministers are justifiably worried about the potential of such media war to bring up the ugly deeds of a government which in spite of its professed withdrawal from business kept on spending wastefully in establishing companies that are outright drain pipes on the nation’s resources. Rural telephony project, Galaxy backbone, Nigcomsat Ltd are some of the contraptions of the expired government which are initiatives of Chinese investors dressed up as though they were ideas to bring affordable telecommunications services to Nigerians. And instead of the officials of the agencies to sit down to resolve their differences, they, very naively, took newspaper adverts to say what is clearly a Chinese thinking written in Nigerian English by Nigerians for Nigerians - 'Chin'ocracy' sort of.

Meanwhile, Board of NCC [bydway of distinguished materials] rose from a meeting mid last week to issue a statement. It nailed the desire of Nigcomsat Ltd to further its service provision objective and rejected, with finality, the latter's application for an operating license. It argued that the role of government is to provide overall direction to telecommunications development and ensure policy consistency. That role, it says, does not include participating in the provision of telecom services, and to deny Nigcomsat a license is consistent with policy objectives as contained in Chapter 2 Section 2.1 of National Telecommunications Policy and premised on ensuring that government divests interest in state owned entities and promotes competition to meet growing demand through full liberalization of the telecom market.


CyberschuulNews 246

BOOST FOR IMMIGRANT I-T TECHIES
MICROSOFT IS ATTRACTING FOREIGN WORKERS TO NEW CENTRE IN CANADA

U.S. technology giant Microsoft Corp. recently announced that it will be setting up shop in Vancouver, British Columbia. The location of the new Microsoft Canada Development Centre was chosen because the city is both “a global gateway with a diverse population,” and “is close to Microsoft corporate offices in Redmond, Washington.” However, the most significant reason, and the one that has stimulated much debate, centers on immigration and temporary foreign workers.

With a high demand for foreign information technology (IT) workers, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates has long lobbied the American government to ease restrictions on temporary work visas (H1-B visas). Recognizing that American immigration policy is not likely to change in the near future, Canada’s more open immigration system for foreign skilled workers has become a more attractive option for Microsoft. The Canadian software development centre will allow “the company to recruit and retain highly skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S.”

In Canada there is no annual limit on the number of work permits issued; Canadian companies in labour-tight industries eagerly use the Temporary Foreign Worker Program to recruit foreign talent. Attracting information technology workers has been deemed a priority in Canada, and special immigration provisions for IT workers have been implemented to facilitate their entry into the Canadian work force.

There is a fundamental difference between the thinking behind temporary foreign workers in the United States and in Canada. A Canadian temporary work permit is seen as the first step to becoming a Permanent Resident and then a Canadian citizen, whereas American H1-B holders are aware that their stay in the U.S. is only temporary. Those Microsoft employees on H1- B visas, who would have to leave the United States when their visas expire, now have the option to transfer to the Microsoft development centre in Canada.

This works well for Microsoft. They can maintain these trained and valued employees, they can benefit from Canada’s more open temporary foreign worker program to recruit additional IT workers from abroad, and their foreign employees can more easily become Permanent Residents and Canadian citizens. Employees are therefore more long-term. The new Microsoft Canada Development Centre also works well for Canada. The country will benefit from the influx of foreign IT workers and the increased investment in Canada’s software development industry.

The Vancouver centre will serve as a base for software development for a full range of Microsoft products. The centre will open in September with a staff of 200 workers and will likely expand to employ 1,000, both Canadian-born and internationally-recruited.

Source: Globe and Mail; Information Week; Seattle Post-Intelligencer

DISTRACTION
NIGCOMSAT LTD. and NCC AT TOURNAMENT
HOUSE OF REP AS REFEREE

It took Murtala Mohammed of blessed memory a few days in office as Head of State of Federal Republic of Nigeria to give effect to his aspiration for Nigeria in the area of telecommunications development. He had thought that with its new oil-rich status, Nigeria was no longer fit to behave as if it was a poor country and it should at least make its people talk among themselves in the shortest possible time. He gave approval for quick-match telecom development projects and ensured that those who made due process of government to constitute a stumbling block to his prescribed speed were removed by merely saying he, Murtala, had approved such decision, post-dated.

Several millions of Naira, which translated to multiples of millions in US Dollars were contracted to ITT, telecommunications giant of the time which, to satisfy the due process apologists, had to take a Nigerian registration. Murtala meant well for his country. His error was that he did not understand the place of due process and he did not care to want to understand.

He argued that if Nigeria could not be placed on the moon, it could at least be placed in space. He was so excited by a presentation of some folks from Canada that he signed the then famous Aerostat Balloon Transmission contract with a warning that whosoever opposed him would go the way of those who had given him contrary opinion earlier.

The remaining is history. Neither the ITT Projects nor the aerostat balloon made Nigeria fly but they constituted the first phase of wastes which Nigeria sincerely went into without knowing what it was doing.

The difference between Murtala Mohammed and others who came after him and who threw Nigeria into wasteful telecommunications investment was that Murtala meant well. He was sincerely naïve. May his good soul rest in peace.

General Olusegun Obasanjo [1st time 1st term] had no reason to apologize to anybody for having similar temperament. He was Murtala's deputy before climbing up to the No 1 seat. He however is less naïve and when it suites him he talks about due process even up till today. He knows where to draw the line between what one says and what he does.

As a President, any president, anything that means progress for society would be approved. Obasanjo however knows quite well that when he gives approval, any approval, he has not told you not to pass the test of due process. Except where he has vested personal interest. He will be ready to deny you if in the name of his approval you run foul of the law.

That is why it makes a joke when some Nigcomsat Ltd apologists took pages of newspaper advertorials to reel out stories that say volume about their cheap imagination of what Nigerians are capable of understanding. Some guy said the president, ie Baba Olusegun Obasanjo, 2nd Time 2nd Term, approved that he be given license so that Nigcomsat Ltd a government owned company, could provide last mile telephone service.

Can you see the joke?

Some Chinese who railroaded Nigeria into some phoney rural telephony projects are still busy propping a new set of people to do another version even in space. There was theatre a few days ago at the National Assembly where the House of Rep Committee was superintending public debate on telephone problems. the theatre was also shown live in virtually all newspapers.


CYBERSCHUULNEWS 245

TASK TEAMS FOR DEVELOPMENT OF MADE-IN-NIGERIA SATELLITE INAUGURATED
Task teams of indigenous scientists and experts from National Space Research and Development Agency, NASRDA, Nigerian Universities, Nigerians in the Diaspora and the private sector, met recently to firm up implementation strategies for the Satellites to Promote Instructional and Research Experiments, SPIRE, project. The project is being coordinated by Centre for Satellite Technology Development, CSTD, Abuja.

Tasks and targets of SPIRE are to meet a Presidential directive that makes the emergence of a made in Nigeria satellite mandatory by 2015 and a total of 128 specialists in various aspects of the job assembled in Abuja to further the process of moving from the talking environment of a conference hall to actual assignment of tasks and targets.

Johnson Ejimanya, a professor and director of CSTD told the assembly that the SPIRE program is planned for phased implementation and charged to build an engineering model of a multi-mission micro satellite in two years.


RACE FOR FIBRE OPTIC CABLE HEATS UP
by
Zachary Ochieng

Battle lines have now been drawn as major players jostle for space in the hitherto uncompetitive international submarine fibre-optic industry.
Notably, the industry has been witnessing growth since last December, with a number of projects on the cards. Whereas two cables are currently undergoing construction between China and the US, various cables are nearing completion between East Africa and India.

The result is that, all have now embarked on a race, with each jostling to be the first one to install a fibre-optic link connecting East Africa to the rest of the world.

But the most vicious competition revolves around connections to Europe, a destination for 85 per cent of international bandwidth traffic in Africa.

Among the projects embroiled in the unprecedented competition are the controversy-riddled East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) fronted by the Government of Kenya, America's Seacom and the Indian-based Reliance Consortium.

Fears, however, abound that despite the stiff competition, none of these projects will be launched on schedule. It is instructive that three vendors, namely Alcatel-Lucent, Tyco International and NEC, who manufacture undersea cables and are in possession of vessels to install the cables dominate the international submarine cable industry.

Reports have it that due to the high workload the three companies are currently handling, it is unlikely that the cable projects will be completed by the end of next year as promised by both EASSy and TEAMS.

It does not help matters that early this month, Kenya turned down an offer from Seacom, currently constructing an undersea fibre-optic cable connecting South Africa to Europe, India and the Middle East, to have a joint venture with TEAMS and reap from economies of scale resulting from shared facilities.

However, TEAMS, which was fronted by Kenya following frustrations with the ownership of EASSy, has been courting bad press over a US$2.7 million tender through single sourcing and shadowy owners.

In January, the Attorney-General's chambers raised alarm following the award of the survey tender to Tyco International without competitive bidding, contrary to public procurement regulations.

Hardly a month later, TEAMS, the US$110 million connecting between Mombasa and Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman, was in the news again when Solicitor General Wanjuki Muchemi blew the whistle upon discovering that records at the Company's Registry showed TEAMS had already been registered by two individuals namely, Jason Wachira, a businessman and Dickson Kahoro, a quantity surveyor.

However, it later emerged that the two individuals had been asked to reserve the name TEAMS in equally mysterious circumstances by the Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK, and also one of the project's implementing agencies.

Whereas the two individuals have since transferred the ownership of the project to the government, with Information and Communications Permanent Secretary Dr Bitange Ndemo and his Treasury counterpart Joseph Kinyua holding the shares on the government's behalf, questions are being raised as to why the government, having its own lawyers and investment advisers, opted to register the company in such mysterious circumstances.

EASSy, the first submarine cable project, has also been dogged by endless controversy over ownership and management. The 9 900 km (6 500 miles) EASSy network to be built on Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing Technology (DWDM) is an initiative to connect countries of eastern and southern Africa via a high bandwidth fibre optic cable system to the rest of the world.

EASSy, considered a milestone in the development of information infrastructure in the continent, is expected to reduce unit costs for global connectivity, leading to increased profitability and lower tariffs and charges for end users.

Above all, EASSy is expected to facilitate inter-Africa trade that will lead to better communication in the continent. It is planned to run from Mtunzini in South Africa to Port Sudan in Sudan with landing points in six countries, and connected to at least five landlocked countries which will no longer have to rely on expensive satellite systems to carry voice and data services.

In September 2006, the Kenyan cabinet gave a nod to the establishment of its own under-sea fibre optic cable known as TEAMS.

An upbeat Information and Communications minister Mutahi Kagwe praised TEAMS' viability, saying that the government is not worried about the emerging competition.

"A government-sponsored feasibility study in this project clearly showed there is a positive business case for TEAMS, in spite of other parallel submarine cable initiatives such as EASSy and Seacom", he states confidently.

Echoing similar sentiments, Dr Henry Chasia, the Executive Deputy Chairperson of the Nepad eAfrica Commission says that having more fibre optic cables will increase competition and lower the cost of bandwidth even further.

Kagwe adds that the government is determined to see TEAMS succeed, noting that the successes of the Asian Tigers were based mainly on heavy investments in ICTs, particularly in the development of high bandwidth fibre backbone networks.

He is also confident that the project will be complete by December 2008, given that the government has already committed KES 1bn in the current financial year.

Besides, the government has already contracted Standard Chartered Bank as a lead arranger to assist raise additional funding from private sector and other sources.

On its part, CCK says the time for fibre-optic cable is ripe and there is no looking back. "We are determined in our efforts to fast-track access in international fibre-optic connectivity to meet the fast growing national requirement for affordable and high capacity bandwidth", says John Waweru, CCK Director General.

Interest in the construction of submarine cables has been growing for the last two years. India's Reliance Group, which failed to clinch Kenya?s Second National Operator (SNO) license after Dubai's VTEL was disqualified, has also promised to provide a third cable along the East African Coast, linking South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar. A few landlocked countries are also set to benefit. The cable, expected to cost US$1.5 billion is billed as the world's biggest network.

But given the controversy that continues to dog the projects and the fact that only three companies have cable-installing facilities, the deadline of 2008 promised to consumers remains a tall order.

taken from www.hana.ru.ac.za

NATIONAL ENGINEERING CENTRE MOVES TO ABUJA
FORMER LAGOS HEAQUARTERS NOW TECHNOLOGY TRAINING CENTRE
The Nigerian Society of Engineers, NSE, has moved its Headquarters to a new National Engineering Centre, Abuja. The complex was formally commissioned on July 26, 2007 by Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a fellow of the association and immediate Past President of Federal Republic of Nigeria.

The National Engineering Centre is the first headquarters of a professional association to be commissioned in Abuja and NSE has now converted its 25 years old National Engineering Centre in Victoria Island, Lagos to a technology training Centre.

Emeka Muoma Ezeh, President of NSE commended the federal government for its listening posture on engineering matters and especially for supporting the completion of Abuja NEC project with a grant of N250m.

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SPECTRUM AUCTIONING
MADE TO IMPROVE SPREAD?
There are indications that the Nigerian Communications Commission may be making a fresh attempt to motivate telephone operators to migrate to low density areas of the country. This will be ahead of providing outright subsidy to support telecommunications into rural Nigeria under the universal service provision fund. The Commission seems to have provided a cheap licensing regime to support roll out of service in some low density regions of the country.

In a recent auction of 3 carriers in the 800Mhz spectrum band, an upstart, Visafone Communications Ltd was allocated frequency and license to rollout telecom service on technology neutral basis in 26 locations. The states covered under the license are Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo, Ekiti, Kwara, Edo, Delta, Benue, Kogi, Niger, Nasarawa, Taraba, Plateau, Bauchi, Gombe, Adamawa, Borno, Yobe, Jigawa, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara, Kebbi, Sokoto States and FCT. These locations, closely studied, are actually low density in fixed service coverage and internet access.

For example, 12 of the 26 states do not have any access to internet by way of the existence of licensed internet service providers. If Visafone pays and executes the license, it would be the fist success story of NCC’s initiatives to motivate service providers to some unattractive regions of the country.

A few years ago, the Commission allocated fixed wireless access licenses to several applicants in the hope that they would traverse the country uniformly but it turned out that virtually all the licensees failed to execute them for what analysts called their poor knowledge of what they were purchasing. It is strange everywhere, except in Nigeria, to find investors plunging into investment which they know very little about and for which they usually do not seek good information or advice or both.

TO GOD be THE GLORY. efcc IS WORKING !!
The story of Nigeria’s telecommunications development post deregulation is full of several chapters of failed investments. Especially in the last eight years, it was usual to see good money tied to licensing only to find the outfit unable to commence active business or the ‘investors’ quarreling among themselves as soon as money started rolling in. You wondered how such people put themselves together in the first place and you heard that one governor somewhere was actually the brain behind the investment but all the quarreling folks were just fronts who were tired of playing the traditional roles of fronts. Suffering from fronts-deficiency syndrome perhaps.

How were the governors getting the money they were throwing into waste?

Now that efcc is working, Nigerians may know where the moneys came from in the last eight years.

To God be the glory!!!

BEYOND THE HYPE AROUND THE CONVERGED IP NETWORK,
WHAT BENEFITS DOES THIS NEW WORLD REALLY DELIVER?
  by
 Samantha Perry

Next-generation networks (NGNs) promise to do what umpteen technologies have done before them: improve productivity, reduce costs, increase ROI, lower TCO, increase efficiency. The list is endless. An NGN can indeed do all of the above, but there are a number of ifs and buts that need to be taken into consideration first.

The first is the ongoing confusion around what an NGN is. To be frank, it's an all-IP, packet-based network. Or, as the ITU prefers: “A packet-based network able to provide services including telecommunication and able to make use of multiple broadband, quality of service-enabled transport technologies and in which service-related functions are independent from underlying transport-related technologies. It offers unrestricted access by users to different service providers. It supports generalised mobility that will allow consistent and ubiquitous provision of services to users.”

In other words, running voice, data and video over a single network doesn't make it an NGN. An NGN by definition is able to provide the broad range of services that have resulted in so much hype in recent years. Simply put, an NGN is the network that enables any form of content to be sent to a user, irrespective of where that user is, what device the user is using at that moment or how that user is connecting. For businesses, this ability has profound consequences that will impact on every level of operations.

Says Frost and Sullivan senior ICT research analyst Corrie Froehlich: “What we have today are product and application silos, disjointed networks and separate devices. What you want to get to in a few years' time is a presence-based, multi-modal/multi-service platform.”

taken from www.itweb.co.za

ECONET COMES UP IN KENYA AGAIN
Econet Wireless whose principal, 46 year old Strive Masiyiwa, is very well known across Africa as the enfant terrible of many boardrooms has announced that it got its GSM license back from the Kenyan regulator a few days ago. The license was awarded in 2003 but revoked shortly afterwards for reason of shareholder misunderstanding.

Econet wireless says the misunderstanding between it and its partners has been resolved. It will however drop the lawsuit it filed against the Kenyan Government, pay cost as well as additional $12m to complete its license fee.

Going by Econet wireless’ forecast, it will roll out service early in 2008. Hopefully Strive will not stick his tongue against the government between now and then.

HOW, WHO REGULATES?
A popular clamour that industry persons are hired to go into regulating agencies rather than allowing industry to steal staff from regulators is gaining ground. Last week at a panel discussion in Johannesburg, ICASA’s big boss Paris Mashile wondered how, going by his experiences, greenhorns in telecom would sit at ICASA to regulate emerging network environment.

Earlier in the year, a discussion team on the ITU platform had broached the advantages of bringing industry hands into regulation for obvious advantage citing Nigeria as a good reference point of a success story of the decade.

At such discussions, panelists appear to reach a consensus especially on the fact that bringing politicians into regulation is one killer medicine the world prays not to apply for even a forsaken country.

Ironically, as the panelists in Joe’burg trade converging arguments, politicians at the national assembly’s lower House in Abuja were talking ‘patriotism’ at a forum where they claimed to be diagnosing poor quality service in the Nigerian Network.

 
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MEGACITIES OF SHARED COMMUNICATION CHALLENGES
SAO PAULO-BRAZIL; LAGOS-NIGERIA
 
On a typical day in Reboucas Avenue in Sao Paulo, Brazil, you will see a swarm of cars which clogs every centimeter bumper to bumper. On another lane, bus 7979 and its like runs like metro on a lane that other cars are forbidden to use. They, the special buses, also convoy one after the other to form a kind of virtual train on tires.

In Lagos, Nigeria a similar plan has since been initiated by the state government which reserves alane and calls it its universal name, BRT [ for Bus Rapid Transit]  Lanes.

For close to 50 years, Brazil went through debilitating congestion in traffic as it turned to a mega city. Its population of 18million made the monster to manage, or so it seems. Lagos for which federal authorities announced a population of less than 10 million became news when its governor, 1999 to 2007, Mr Bola Tinubu [ a.k.a. the only standing son of Oodua] rejected the figure and derived 18 million from its own estimates. Tinubu argues that if federal authorities are allowed to go away with lies about population figures, they would make solution impossible to attain since the problems might just be underestimated.

The Lagos state government has gone ahead to adopt the Brazilian initiative by establishing the BRT lanes on which only special transit busses are permitted to ride.

Would it solve the 40-year old problem of traffic congestion in Lagos?

Big question!!

Let’s go back to Brazil

In a transportation world that has dreamed up such systems as maglev bullet trains and “smart roads” capable of guiding vehicles, bus-based mass transit may appear quite low-tech. But in São Paulo the buses themselves are only the most visible part of a vast operation that relies on a number of advanced technologies: computer simulations help plan the bus network, GPS monitoring keeps track of the fleet, and electronic payment streamlines fare collection. And in an experiment to reduce pollutant emissions, later this year São Paulo will test a small number of hydrogen-fuel-cell buses on one of the city’s busiest busways.

None of this technology would be of much use without experienced bus engineers, of whom São Paulo has plenty. Over the years this cadre of bus pros has been disseminating its expertise throughout Brazil and beyond. As Pedro Szasz, a consultant in São Paulo and one of the world’s top public transportation experts, puts it, “Brazilians are good at soccer, samba, and bus systems.”

Return to Lagos. The Lagos state government is yet to tell its people the full stories about the planned special buse routes. If it has done so, may be not just enough. An attempt to commence the system a few months ago was quickly suspended for more thoughtful planning.

Would it be aborted again in the near future when it re-launches? The Senior Advocate at Alausa has to speak up!

With notes from www.spectrum.ieee.org/jun07/5139


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NIGERIA IS 63RD IN WORLD ICT RATING

A mid-July 2007 report on global IT industry competitiveness published by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) of UK places Nigeria behind 62 others in the world. With the first 5 countries as USA, Japan, South Korea, UK and Australia. the IT competitive index is computed from six categories of quantitative and qualitative indicators which include human capital, IT infrastructure, legal environment, overall business environment, R&D environment, and support for IT industry development.

South Africa places 37, Egypt 55 and Algeria 59.


FREQUENCY AUCTION:
VISAFONE COMMUNICATIONS LIMITED WINS

The Nigerian Communications Commission has announced that Visafone Communications Limited has won the bid for the 3 Carriers in the 800 MHz spectrum band at its reserved Price of N400million.

A few weeks ago the Commission published a public notice on its decision to award three (3) Carriers in the 800 MHz spectrum band through an auction process based on requests by interested Licensed Network Operators that require the spectrum to meet planned roll out of services. Subsequently, an Information Memorandum was issued, in which bid applications for the available spectrum slot were invited.

The Commission said only 4 bids were received at submission deadline from GiCell Wireless Limited, Multilinks Telecommunications Limited, TC Africa Telecoms Network Limited, and Visafone Communications Limited.

The four (4) applications were evaluated based on the pre-qualification criteria outlined in the Information Memorandum. Only one applicant was found to have been fully compliant with the criteria. In consonance with the primary objective of the auction as well as the provisions of the Information Memorandum, which stated that, if there is only one approved bidder, the Commission will provisionally award the spectrum to this bidder at the Reserve Price.

The frequency will enable Visafone, to roll out services in 26 states of the federation if it eventually pays for the frequency. The applicable states are Ogun, Ondo, Osun, Oyo, Ekiti, Kwara, Edo, Delta, Benue, Kogi, Niger, Nasarawa, Taraba, Plateau, Bauchi, Gombe, Adamawa, Borno, Yobe, Jigawa, Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara, Kebbi, Sokoto States and FCT – Abuja.


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INTERNET EXCHANGE GOES LIVE IN LAGOS

An Internet Exchange which promises tremendous technical and economic gains within the internet community has been switched on in Lagos. Managing Director of Internet Point of Nigeria [NIXP] Mr. Muhammed Rudman, announced on Tuesday that with this development, keeping Nigerian internet traffic within Nigeria would improve service delivery and ultimately reduce cost to end users. At take-off, NIXP has negotiated a landmark agreement with NITEL to provide SAT-3 transit traffic at the rate of $2,800 per megabit per second duplex connection to all NIXP members marking a major reduction from the previous price of $6,300. Rudman invites all the major players in the industry to become transit providers for NIXP if they can provide same or lower rates than that being provided by NITEL.

Several ISP's are already connecting to the exchange just as some PTOs, notably Starcomms, MTS First, 21st Century, all as members of the Internet Service Providers Association of Nigerian, ISPAN, have already signed up.

With ISPAN as pressure-group, the exchange was built with support funding from the Nigerian Communications Commission and additional exchange points are expected to emerge at 5 other locations in the country in due course.

POWER TO THE BASE STATIONS – A MODEST PROPOSITION
by
Russell Southwood

Africa’s mobile operators have achieved an enormous amount in a very short period of time. Their roll-out of mobile services to millions of people has energised the economies of many African countries. However, much of what has been put in place is both costly to operate and requires logistical operations that overcome almost impossible obstacles. Hats off to them because they can do it but is it a sensible way to run a business? One of the largest Sub-Saharan operators has over 5,000 base stations in a single country, many with two back-up generators. Is it in the telephony or the power business?

A base station might cost a mobile operator in the region of US$125,000 for everything: the mast, the generators, the equipment to transmit, air conditioners to cool it, fencing and a hut for the equipment. In countries like Nigeria or South Africa, the number of base stations required runs into the thousands. For most other African countries, an operator would require hundreds of base stations. For example, MTN’s Lonestar in Liberia, a relatively small but undeveloped country, will have 100 base stations at the end of its current investment phase.

Many of these base stations are in urban areas and have a power supply from the state energy utility. These only require one diesel generator as a back-up source to cover the all-too-frequent power outages found in most African countries. But beyond the reach of the national power grid, the operator has to install two diesel generators, allowing for continuous generator-provided energy in the event of one generator failing. In addition, some sites are so far from the point where diesel can be obtained that they require tanks to store up to three months worth of fuel: in other words, at these base stations, operators literally have money buried in the ground.

Enormous sums of money are spent both on fuel and on transporting it around African countries to service these base stations. In one of the more extreme cases on the continent, an operator has to send the fuel by boat where it is then hand-loaded off the boat on to a lorry for the final portion of its journey. Lorries used on roads in the West African rainy season are very rapidly wrecked beyond the point where maintenance is useful.

The more urban base stations with relatively easy access to roads and grid power can cost US$2500 a month to run. By contrast, the rural bases stations without either of these advantages can cost up to US$20,000 month to run: in other words, each base station of this type costs an additional $210,000 a year to run.

So both capex and opex are held high through lack of power to the base stations. There are three threads to untying the knot of how to supply power to more base stations: the current assumptions around power generation; the taxes levied on mobile operators; and the universal service levies made.

No-one who has worked in Africa for any length of time will have escaped the “lights-out” moment. The grid power goes down and if you’re lucky, you sit in darkness until the emergency generator kicks in. Speaking personally, on many occasions this has been in hotels running conference events. Pause for a moment to think….

Organisations like hotels can and probably do pay their electricity bills. Yet because the monopoly power operator has not invested enough in its grid and cannot manage demand properly, it turns off its power when it overloads. So demand is not the problem but supply is. The only near parallel in telecoms is when mobile operators fail to provision sufficient capacity and the network goes down: Nairobi on a Friday afternoon might be an example. In both cases at that point supply is being rationed rather randomly.

Power supply is often a monopoly (either private or public) and on rare occasions a duopoly. But in almost all cases these are vertically integrated organisations that combine both transmission and local delivery, not so dissimilar to the early days of African telecoms. But the reality is hundreds of thousands of costly individual diesel generators as people seek to pay their way (rather inefficiently) out of the mess of the current power utilities have created through under-supply.

So why not allow a greater range of service providers and generators who can put both investment into smaller-scale power generation and transmission? In other words allow a town-sized generator in a rural area to provide power across the local area and if there is a surplus of power, put it into the national grid. Promote pre-payment cards and electronic vouchering as a way of cheapening the financial transaction.

What’s this got to with base stations?, I hear you ask. We’ll come to that all in good time. Currently Africa’s mobile companies are charged somewhere between 25-35% in taxes. No-one is saying that the mobile companies should not pay taxes and because they are efficient organisations, they serve as an extremely useful way for less efficient Governments to collect tax. But the higher the tax levels imposed on the companies, the higher their operating costs and as sure as night follows day, the higher the amounts they have to charge people for using their services.

So you have two things that might have some impact on the power to base stations issue standing very close to each other. The mobile operators cannot reduce their base station energy costs because there is no power transmission. Government is responsible for the supply of power transmission. Government is collecting money to provide public services like power transmission but for whatever reasons (and they are many) does not have the capacity to act on the supply of power transmission with any speed but it has collected money to do so. Hold that thought.

So we come to the third thread in the knot: universal service agencies and their funds. According to World Bank global figures, universal service mechanisms have collected US$6.2 billion but thus far have only managed to spend US$1.7 billion, leaving US$4.5 billion “in the pot”. Again according to the World Bank, a further US$3.8 billion will be collected by 2010. Universal service charges to operators are between 2-5% depending on the country. However, the story these figures tell is that the universal service access money cannot be spent fast enough. So again we have money that might tackle the power to the base station task.

The difficulty for Government and its agencies is that in most African countries, the money has simply been put away in the wrong drawer, labelled ‘please spend on telecoms only’. For Africa has only three horizontal regulators (Mauritania, Niger and Rwanda) who have the task of tackling both power and telecoms issues together. But this is simply “box mentality” and if there is a recognition that the problem is important and a will to do something about, money exists to tackle it. If the recent forum held by Nigeria’s regulator NCC is anything to go by (see Telecoms News below) then there is an awakening understanding that power is a problem. It’s then a case of converting this into political will to get something done.

So how might it get done? On the investment side, it would be possible with political will to get both Government and its universal service agencies to contribute financially to the task. The devil’s bargain between the Government and the mobile operators is as follows: we lower your taxes and in exchange you help us solve a range of agreed power transmission problems. The Government wins by extending the power network. The mobile operators win through getting lower operating costs on their base stations.

In a nutshell, the mobile operators appoint a private company to build and operate a power transmission network. This company would have as its anchor customers at least two mobile companies. Whatever surplus power it generated would either be sold to the national grid operator or be sold on to retail customers. There are private investors in Africa wanting to put money into private power generation and perhaps they might also come in as investors. The mobile operators have shown that it is possible to get things done on the continent and to make money doing it. Perhaps they should now pick up the gauntlet that will allow them to address their high operating costs and get lower taxes at the same time.

This essay is reproduced unedited from www.balancingact-africa.com/news/back/balancing-act_361.html#head


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NCC warns Operators on Sales Promotions

Mobile service providers in Nigeria have been asked to suspend sales promotions, which really were unuseful hypes, and face network rehabilitation so consumers may get value for their money. The Nigerian Communications  Commission was reported to have  also asked for more frequent situation report on improvement of quality of service from the operators. In particular, Celtel which had been on a road show for a “Sunday free Calls Bonus”  was recently instructed not to embark on any future promotional activities geared towards encouraging more minutes of calls in excess of its current capacity for a period of ninety (90) days in the first instance.



CYBERSCHUULNEWS 239
 
iPHONE : A NEW e-RAZZMATAZZ

Its real and it got delivered as promised. Call it IP-Phone, you get the meaning right in the name. It is a phone that rides on IP. Just that telecom people are impatient even with words. You know about the iPod and all its dazzling features and of course about the camera phones. Now think of a phone that will be three devices in one: a cell phone, a wide-screen iPod with touch controls, and an Internet communications device. It is also a consummated marketing marriage of two giants; Apple and AT&T (formerly Cingular).

Both Apple and AT&T commenced selling June 29. It will be in Europe in the fourth quarter, and in Asia 2008. It’s 4G. Must have set the Glo guys thinking, bet you.

STUDY REVEALS HIDDEN STRATEGY FOR 3G DEPLOYMENT

The widespread deployment of 3G networks in the 900MHz GSM spectrum band, as well as the 2100MHz band, could enable an additional 300 million people across Asia, Europe and Africa to enjoy mobile broadband services by 2012, according to a study by the analyst and consulting company Ovum for the GSMA.

The greater range of radio waves in the lower spectrum band and their ability to provide better coverage in buildings would enable operators to achieve much broader 3G coverage, particularly in rural areas. The study shows that a 3G network in the 900MHz band would achieve up to 40% greater coverage than a 3G network in the 2100MHz band for the same capital expenditure.

The cost-effectiveness of 3G at 900MHz would be of particular significance in developing countries, many of which are looking to HSPA, an evolution of the leading 3G technology, to provide high-speed Internet access in the many regions that lack fixed-line infrastructure. However, Ovum cautions that the level of success of 3G in the 900MHz band will depend on multiple countries making this spectrum band available in a harmonised way, so that equipment manufacturers have a large market to target and can quickly achieve economies of scale, particularly for handsets.

“National governments need to coordinate their spectrum policies to enable the widespread rollout of HSPA in the 900MHz band,” said Tom Phillips, Chief Government and Regulatory Affairs Officer of the GSMA. “Such coordination would make HSPA at 900MHz a cost-effective way to provide valuable broadband services to the many people untouched by the high-speed Internet revolution that has swept through the developed world.”

Ovum envisages that operators would use 900MHz to provide widespread 3G coverage, supplemented by 3G at 2100MHz in urban ‘hot-spots’ that need more capacity. The extensive use of both the 900MHz and the 2100MHz bands for 3G in Asia–Pacific countries could lead to 450 million people in the region using 3G by 2012, if all operators chose to deploy 3G and the majority of investment goes into 3G at 900MHz. If 3G were restricted to 2100MHz alone, Ovum forecasts there will be just 200 million people using 3G in the region by 2012.

In light of these findings, the GSMA urges regulators, together with vendors, to plan together for the coordinated refarming of 900/1800MHz spectrum, which is widely used for GSM in Europe, Asia and Africa, and for the availability of compatible and affordable handsets. Such global planning will give investors the confidence to fund the development of 3G/HSPA at 900MHz and 1800MHz as well. There should be no differentiation between the different GSM bands (900/1800/1900) to avoid any distortion of competition among GSM operators. The same benefits would also be achieved by refarming 850MHz spectrum (widely used in US and Latin America).

“As well as requiring lower up-front investments than 3G/HSPA at 2100MHz, a 3G network at 900MHz is more cost-efficient and is better at handling both voice and data traffic, compared to GSM,” said Stewart Anderton, Principal Consultant at Ovum Consulting. “But 900MHz is one of the most used spectrum bands in the world and regulators must be careful to avoid interference with existing GSM services or interference across national borders.”

The study examines the economics of 3G-network rollout at different frequency bands, but does not attempt to address the potential competitive effects of refarming.

source : www.cellular-news.com



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MOBILE OPERATORS BLAME POWER
FOR POOR QUALITY OF SERVICE

Clutching several mobile phone terminals gradually became part of normal dressing in Nigeria. They say phones don't work so they have to acquire several; sometimes as many phones as the networks that exist. But recently they found it has not been a solution. A mobile operator got a first degree sanction from the regulator while others are still responding to its queries. Midweek, the NCC hosted a public forum to identify issues affecting Quality of Service because for some time telephones almost stopped connecting people.  Delegates to the forum left with conclusion that chaotic electric power from the public supply is responsible for poor performance of the major mobile networks. Mobile Operators  have 30million lines  while others do 2million. They also cited vandalisation of equipment, limited human resource capacity and security as other factors. The operators' position runs contrary to opinion of local analysts who reasoned that the recent attempt by operators to migrate from using first-word vendor equipment to the cheaper third-world stuff is causing stress for the network operators. But the operators are not saying so. NCC  announced it would establish a pan-industry Quality of Service working group which would henceforth serve as an industry ombudsman on quality of service.

CYBERSCHUULNEWS 237

RUSSIA: A DIFFERENT TELECOM STORY

Telecom operators are worried stiff that return on investment in telecommunications in Russia calls for extreme caution on how money is thrown into it. This pessimism was expressed last month when a conference on The Russian Telecom Opportunity was held in Moscow. One delegate told others that in Russia’s mobile sector; demand for value added services is a lot lower than in many other countries. Russians’ usage of SMS is tardy and another speaker who is a researcher revealed that only 6 percent of respondents to an enquiry said they would use more SMS even if prices were lowered.


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UN LAUNCHES CAMPAIGN FOR INCLUSIVE TECHNOLOGY
AS NIGERIA SETS to PROVIDE FOR CHALLENGED GROUPS

The Global Initiative for Inclusive Information and Communication Technology, an international campaign to widen access to digital technologies, has been launched by the United Nations. It aims to encourage technology vendors to build accessibility into mass-market products by promoting worldwide adoption of new standards, regulations and legislation.
The Global Initiative aims to remove the need for people with disabilities to buy assistive products that are often expensive and difficult to maintain. In this it supports Article 9 of the recently unveiled Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which requires governments to ensure that “technologies and systems become accessible at minimum cost".
Hendrietta Ipeleng Bogopane-Zulu, a vision impaired politician from South Africa, told the UN that a screen reader is essential for her work as a member of parliament. "I use [the Freedom Scientific Screen reader] 'Jaws'. But it's very expensive because it's dollar-based. When converted to [South Africa's currency] the rand, it becomes unaffordable for most people," she said.
In Nigeria, where people with disabilities have not made it yet to parliament, The Nigerian Communications Commission through the universal service provision funding is known to be paying attention to providing services to challenged groups and to all Nigerians no matter their economic or social status.
The main challenge, which is already appreciated by both the United Nations, UN and the Nigerian government, is to strike a balance between changing industry practices while enabling global markets in accessible products to develop, which will help to drive down costs and improve quality. It is also important to take the matter to open discussion with private sector investors who at the end of the day are the vehicle of delivery.

BROADBAND WIRELESS: TRULY THE NEXT LEVEL

The broadband wireless market is not only growing fast, it is also changing and moderating the way we work, play and pray. This makes it quite challenging even for those in the know to keep abreast of the latest developments and emerging technologies.
Point is; multi-megabit throughput, dramatic applications inconceivable in wide-area wireless just a few years ago, is on its way to becoming common over the next few years. Already 3 of the four GSM operators in Nigerian have been given licenses to launch 3G services and in other climes 4G technologies are beginning to surface.
Then there's 802.11n and a host of additional performance and management improvements that are about to appear in Wi-Fi products, which means IT organisations need to get these advances into the planning cycle now.
At the same time, convergence is not only reshaping the network and telecoms landscape, but is also redefining how enterprise networks serve their users.
And as if adapting a wired LAN for voice over IP is not difficult enough, wireless introduces an entirely new set of concerns and considerations. The biggest of these, of course, is overall performance, but there are also key decisions to be made regarding security, management, and integration with existing voice and data networks.
What are the alternatives, underlying technologies, and timeframes for 4G deployments? What are the key developments in 802.11 and Wi-Fi that business should be informed about? How should business take advantage of converged networks and what are the opportunities and potential pitfalls?
If you have answers to some of these questions and believe you can add value to the programme, an ITWeb Broadband & Wireless 2007 Conference is in the making and you may just want to be part of it. Contact mariette@itweb.co.za for details.
Also in October 2007 THE CYBERSCHUUL, Nigeria’s foremost Institute for training in telecommunications is partnering with others to discuss the subject with emphasis on the Nigerian Market. Won’t be a publicly advertised event, but a discussion among select international experts. It may hold either in Lagos or in Abuja. Any interest in any aspect of the subject matter should be expressed to tec@cyberschuul.com

CAMPAIGNS are now PRODUCTS

Nigeria’s big players in the telecom sector, Mobile [GSM] operators, are monopolizing space in product marketing. Celtel, formerly VMobile, whose 65% acquisition by Celtel forced its change of name celebrated one year of the name change by throwing 200 million Naira of airtime up for grabs. Its image maker, Emeka Oparah, said after achieving their core objective of making life better for Nigerians, the next level was to make N200million of airtime free for buyers of Celtel’s airtime. MTN on the other hand is throwing BlackBerry Pearl and BlackBerry 8700g into the market. Campaign managers, XLR8 are out with full literature on the high-end strengths of the products. Powerful technical features, multimedia capabilities, complete with USB cable for message transfer. Infact BlackBery became an object of fine comments at the recent Tinapa Summit.

Fine. Except that all these are happening at a time when 2 out of every three calls made across the networks are failing and money gets paid even for calls that fail. Information is short on what operators are doing to improve quality and reduce cost which appears to be the dream of consumers. ALTON, Association of Licensed Telecom Operators in Nigeria, in an advertorial admitted the problems and gave promises which experts say are actually low on facts and figures.

HIGHWAY IN CYBERSPACE
NIGERIA LAUNCHES NIGCOMSAT-1

Relying on Chinese expertise, technical support and launch vehicle, Long March 3B, Nigeria put a communications satellite in Orbit on May 13, 2007. It is reported to have positioned at 42oE. It had a launch mass of 5,150 kg, and an expected service life of 15 years. It is based on the Chinese DFH-4 satellite bus, and carries a variety of transponders:C-band[4] , Ku-band[14] , Ka-band[8] and L-band[2].
Coming up few days to the terminal date of the Obasanjo 8 year rule which Nigerians refused to extend, it could count as a political plus. Prof Turner Isoun, Minister of Science and Technology who midwifed the project was understandably very pleased and he said so. In developing economies, such projects have their ways of retrogressing if not completed by the initiating regime.
It is envisaged that Nigcomsat-1 will complement SAT-3 submarine cable optical fibre system, which links Europe with West African countries and, from NEPAD’s perspective, will complement Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) to link the Eastern African countries to Europe through the catalytic efforts of the NEPAD e-Africa Commission, the ICT task team under the African Union NEPAD programme responsible for developing and implementing NEPAD ICT Programmes and projects.
Commendation came largely from those who conceived and implemented the project especially government officials and their contractors.
Shola TAYLOR, CEO of Kemilinks International, the firm that conducted the requirements analysis, provided the basic design and configuration and submitted a comprehensive business plan to the Nigerian Government for implementation says it is a great achievement for Nigeria and Africa.
NIGCOMSAT Ltd, a government owned company, will market the resources.

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ATCON RESTRUCTURES

A major shift in operating structure of the Association of Telecommunication Companies of Nigeria, ATCON, is now in place. Its President, Dr Emmanuel Ekuwem, told delegates at a recent Annual General meeting that the association would now operate through Industry Committees to enable an all-inclusive functioning of the association. He also mentioned a planned refocusing of the annual Nigerian Telecommunications Conference and Exhibition, NICOMM, as well as a proposal to moderate the proliferation of industry awards.
The Committee system is an acclaimed model which enables wider participation of members in the affairs and decision making process of their association.

C BAND SPECTRUM THREAT IS REAL!

Significant technical threat to the business of spectrum providers is not abating and the Global VSAT Forum, GVF, has since last year warned its members on the dangers.
Point is: the extended C-band frequencies (3.4 to 3.7 GHz) have already been identified by several national administrations and regulators for use by new services like Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) and WiMax. In addition, other administrations are planning to deploy these new terrestrial services in the standard C-band frequencies (3.7 to 4.2 GHz). In countries where WiMax services have been introduced, there have been significant in-band and out-of-band interference issues and service interruptions for satellite ground stations and their related services.
In a few cases, C-band spectrum is also being targeted for deployment of terrestrial mobile services. BWA and IMT services are similar in that they are both characterized by a large number of ubiquitously deployed base stations and user terminals. FSS satellite systems deliver extremely weak signals which are highly sensitive in both the standard and extended C-band frequencies.
Some have argued that the most effective solution to avoid interference from these services is to separate the systems by implementing exclusion zones around existing FSS earth stations. However, exclusion zones are impractical in the case of ubiquitously deployed C-band antennas (as such zones can not be defined) and for C-band antennas at known locations the width of such zones may go up several hundreds of kilometres, preventing therefore the deployment of terrestrial IMT in large areas. Furthermore, the implementation of exclusion zones would negatively impact the ability of FSS operators to expand operations beyond existing earth stations.
Perhaps the major solution to protect satellite services in the extended and standard C-band frequencies is to separate them from terrestrial systems such as WiMax or BWA by several to thousands of kilometers, or to find other spectrum for these services to operate.
The GVF has therefore among other things requested its members to register their receive-only and transmitting earth stations that operate in the extended and standard C-band frequencies with their local telecom regulatory authority so that they can be afforded the proper protection against interference.
GVF is also hoping that telecom regulators would avoid the reassignment of C-band frequencies to BWA and WiMax services.
source www.gvf.org


THE EVDO ENTRY

Those who use laptops in major Nigerian cities now have wireless broadband internet access without need for a hotspot regardless of whether they use Windows, Mac OSX or Linux. What they need is to insert an EVDO, Evolution Data Only [some say Evolution Data Optimized] into the laptop and speeds in the region of 500K to 800K several times faster than the dial up mode may just be at their reach. In practical terms though the speeds picked up by several users in Lagos, Abuja , and Ibadan say things come slower than what the theory and brochures say.
The service is available for about $200 startup and a monthly $75.00 from operators which deploy CDMA.
EVDO is a recent technology, as recent as 2005 and it is a CDMA standard which is not compatible with GSM.

4G GOES ON TEST

It’s all about speed, scalability, and low cost. A solution that delivers bandwidth applications at one-tenth of the 3G cost gives itself a name. You call it the Next Level. Some other guys say it is 4G.
Nortel, the Canadian telecom giant, demonstrated its 4G solutions at the WiMAX Asia 2007 a few days ago and it says it is what Taiwan's Mobile Healthcare Services ("M-Care") rides on.

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BELIEVE IT
NEWS IS THAT THE INTERNET IS ALREADY OLD
AND IT IS BEING CONSIDERED FOR REPLACEMENT

The current global network, the Internet, is considered old and due for a change. Researchers at several universities, most of them in the USA, are working to design a new internet to replace the current version. Top on the list of issues that the new version will address include security, mobility, and convergence-related issues which incidentally it inspired in the wake of its revolution.
The promoters of this vision are however conscious of the enormous cost which migration to the new system promises and they seem to be planning for a ten year realization time. The European Union is known to have bankrolled research on such initiatives, through a program known as Future Internet Research and Experimentation, FIRE. Government officials and researchers met recently in Zurich to discuss early nitty-gritty of the plan.
The internet is 37 years old having kicked off in September 1969. It was first mentioned publicly in Nigeria in April 1995, grew rather slowly, high on public awareness at the moment but low on access. Access is yet on its way to rural Nigeria through a pragmatic penetration of rural Nigeria under the Universal Service Provision Fund which is working to provide 12 rural communications centres immediately, 80 in a next phase while all 774 local government areas may have broadband coverage by year 2011.

3G WAR. DO OR DIE FOR CDMA.
CHALLENGE FOR AFRICAN REGULATORS

Few weeks ago in the USA, the CDMA Development Group [CDG] came to the conclusion that it has quite a deal of work to do in Africa. In Nigeria, Africa's fastest growing telecom market, the GSM mobile providers used their huge capital base to force government to reserve the few available 3G licenses for them. In terms of absolute number of operators, CDMA has significant placement in Africa. Ditto for middle East. But not yet for investment penetration in the regions.
Incidentally this is happening at a time when Nigerian authorities’ maneuvers to use unified licensing as bait to drive down cost of service is yet to deliver. When the idea of unified licensing was mooted by the regulator early in 2006, it received a loud murmuring which eventually reached protest level by the GSMs. But the regulator had its way on points of logic, bare facts and popular opinion. Industry tacticians had expected that with the CDMA operators migrating into nationwide mobile, movement of cost and prices would favour consumers. GSM guys thought otherwise and are still working to keep end-user prices up. Indeed the envisaged rise in fixed services' prices happened while that of lowering mobiles' is yet to. Celtel which announced a 'FLAT tariff plan' that eliminates price discrimination by providing the same rates across all networks merely played games in real terms. Not much changed.
Recently, Gbenga Adebayo, a highly respected pro and president of association of telephone operators was pressured to voice the possibility of a price hike as fallout of emerging threats of endless multiple taxes from all arms of governments nationwide. So much amidst severely low quality service that compelled the NCC to announce it was wading into the matter. NCC's topshots were reported to have been in various brainstorming sessions aimed at taming the monster of poor service and high cost.
CDMA’s reputation for voice clarity, broadband power, and lower cost structure make it an ideal solution to meet the growing demand for affordable fixed and mobile services in emerging markets. Several of its users in Nigeria however face problems of liquidity and troubled management all rooted in the history of how the Nigerian market emerged. Infact the weedoff figure of providers which are ailing, realigning and closing shop has been on the rise. A few weeks ago, Intercellular completed an arrangement which saw its management team eased out of the operations just as a wholesale sack of those at MTS few days after paints a picture of unending turbulence in that firm. Mobitel and EMIS have since closed shop and one or two are about to. And so on, and so on.
Feelers from Abuja indicate that the regulator may be changing its gloves to punchier ones as it issues 3G Licenses.

NIGERIA COMMENCES LOCAL INTERNET ADMINISTRATION

Nigerian professionals got together on May 1 to appoint a new administration under the auspices of NiRA, Nigeria Internet Registration Association, just early enough before the effort becomes irrelevant. Ndukwe Kalu, a tested private sector engineer-activist would lead a committee of 10 to work towards an upbeat of Nigeria’s name in cyberspace. He is a notable arrowhead of ISPAN effort on the successful campaign for the construction of an NCC funded Internet exchange which is due for commissioning very shortly.


CyberschuulNews 080307-233

FULLY NETWORKED CAR EMERGES

At the moment, International Telecommunications Union, ITU, International Standards Organization (ISO) and International Electro technical Commission (IEC) are jointly reviewing and examining the implications of the latest developments in the fast-moving market for information and communication technologies (ICT) in motor vehicles at the next Geneva Motor Show.
Here we are talking of communication from and to the car, location-based services, multimedia entertainment, diagnostics, safety and automatic emergency call (e-call).
What will engage the workshop delegates will include shedding light on questions such as; what must we do to face the technical and engineering challenges? How do we make sure that the right standards are adopted to deal with the complexity of so many electronic components? And what are the best ways to allow this market to develop its full potential?

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ITU SAYS THE 'DIVIDE' IS THINNING OUT

Access to information and communication technologies continues to grow at high speed and the digital divide – in terms of mobile subscribers, fixed telephone lines and Internet users - keeps getting smaller. ITU statistics show that by the end of 2004, the telecommunication industry had experienced continuous growth, as well as rapid progress in policy and technology development, resulting in an increasingly competitive and networked world. There are more ICT users worldwide and more people communicating than at any other time in history. By the end of 2004, the world counted a total of three billion telephone subscribers, 1.8 billion mobile subscribers and 1.2 billion fixed lines. Both, the number of mobile subscribers and the number of Internet users more than doubled in just four years. By end 2004, the world had over 840 million Internet users, which means that on average 13 percent of the world’s population was online.
It is true and encouraging, that overall, the digital divide has been reduced. ITU’s statistics show that within four year, from 2000 to 2004, the gap separating the developing and the developed countries has been shrinking in terms of mobile subscribers, fixed telephone lines and Internet users. ITU measures the gap (the digital divide) by dividing the ICT penetration rate in the developed world by the ICT penetration rate in the developing world. Phenomenal growth rates in the mobile sector, particularly, have been able to reduce the gap from nine in the year 2000, to four by the end of 2004. This gap has also been reduced in terms of fixed lines, from six to four, and from 15 to 8 in terms of Internet users.
Just as ITU may be basking in this euphoria, analysts see a real threat to the rapid and steady growth in Africa's largest telecommunications market. Nigeria's telecommunications regulator, NCC, may be undergoing stress as analysts forecast that the agency's robust independence which the Communications Act guarantees may be eroded if the incoming government maintains current attitude. The government recently awarded a spectrum for operating GSM services to Mubadala Development of the United Arab Emirate for a huge $400million in disobedience to a law which intends that such award be made under fair contest. In a surprise move early in the year, government merely asked the regulator to allocate the spectrum to its favorite, scrapped the Ministry of Communications, and kicked the regulator to the Ministry of public information. It is feared that the urge to source under-the-table funds for electioneering might have pushed the government into a few income and contract awards which may not be healthy for Nigeria's future.

BOOST FOR MOBILE ACCESS IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

On February 6, 2007, the International Telecommunications Union, ITU, and the GSM Association, GSMA, signed a memorandum of Understanding to strengthen cooperation towards improved access to mobile phone services aimed especially at further bridging the digital divide in least developed and developing countries.
The MoU was concluded by the Secretary-General of ITU, Dr Hamadoun Touré, and Mr Tom Phillips, Chief Government & Regulatory Affairs officer of the GSMA, during the meeting of the Global Symposium for Regulators which held in Dubai during the week. The nitty-gritty of the agreement focuses on supporting developing market projects for low cost access to ICT in underserved areas by :
-Using the GSMA’s Development Fund to invest in sustainable projects that seek to extend access to and the value of mobile services in the developing world.
-Facilitating closer dialogue between industry and governments, and
-Coordinating and enhancing research and statistical databases with a view to improving decision-making by compiling comprehensive shared resource of key industry performance indicators and benchmarks.

NIGERIA: 3G SPECTRUM GOES ON AUCTION

The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, has made information on the auction of 3G spectrum available on its website http://www.ncc.gov.ng/  The announcement gives details of the spectrum block to be made available, pre-qualification criteria, the reserve price, method of expression of interest, and an indicative timetable for the auction. The Commission is gearing towards conducting the auction during the week commencing 02 April 2007.

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