CyberschuulNews 294 China adds 45million mobile lines in January - May 2008 Mobile telephone subscribers base in China has climbed to 592 million, a little less than half of that country’s population of 1.3billion. Fixed lines whose growth has actually been on the decline is given as 358 million. The figures were published by Chinese telephone authorities as position of the industry by end May 2008. Corresponding figures for Nigeria which has a tenth of China’s population is 45.5million and 1.5million at end April, 2008, courtesy NCC's data on its website. Nigerian Banks set to invade telecom industry Banks, yes commercial banks, may afterall commence owning telecommunication service provision companies very soon if recent newspaper leaks are anything to go by. Business Day has just reported that Intercontinental Bank is plotting a deal to pick an operating license for mobile services just as two other unnamed ones are said to be making similar moves. Intercontinental Bank is planning to ride on the back of the license owned by Mobitel, its defunct customer, but to provide services under a different name.  Banks have always wanted to engage in virtually any cash generating ventures regardless of  rules guiding the games in different sectors of the economy. Once, banks were almost selling recharge cards just as they were selling estate properties and infact text books and pancakes so long as they fetch cash. It was a move which the Obasanjo regime (1999 - 2007) virtually endorsed especially as he inched towards the evil Third Term Agenda for whose sake Nigeria was almost handed over to the bankers.  It is not clear in whose names the telecom licenses, if any, are being issued by the industry regulator and what technocrats consider these to mean to the industry. 340 trillion web addresses, relaxed top level domain, Dramatic turn-around of Internet usage is likely Internet regulators, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted during the week to begin the process of relaxing the rules for generic top-level domain names (gTLD). With that, the limitation of domain names to represent individual countries [ .ng for Nigeria, .uk for United Kingdom, .it for Italy etc] will expand to allow companies to turn their brands into top level domain names while individuals could also define their on terrain on the net.  ICANN also unanimously approved a fast-track process to create a limited number of internationalized domain names that would allow addresses to be written in languages using a non-Latin script, such as Cyrillic, Arabic or Chinese.  In a manner of talking, the internet will ultimately become a virtual mass of real estate where everybody buys his/her own piece of land.  Although the impact of the change is bound to be different for different countries of the world, what is clear is that it will affect humanity positively if individual governments prepare their geography for the information Society.  Already the IP version 6, IPv6, is expected to enable 340 trillion web addresses to be registrable and that means quite a lot. New awareness may require to be created at all levels of human communities creating new applications and opportunities. For access to web opportunities please click here The Challenge of Accessibility Every day, millions of people around the world who have a disability, are faced with frustrating, even impossible, situations. ITU believes that these people should enjoy the same services and opportunities in life as everyone else. Achieving the goal of equitable communication for everyone requires:  - Accessible design: Accessibility has to be built in into products and services from the very beginning  - Availability: Accessible products and services must be on hand to users  - Affordability: Access to products and services must be reasonable Finding solutions to these challenges is not always a simple matter. On the one hand, equipment and software is now available that provides amazing breakthroughs for people with disabilities. On the other hand, there are many barriers to finding the most appropriate equipment, particularly at a price that is affordable. This is a policy and digital divide issue because the majority of disabled persons, even in OECD countries, are unemployed and in low-income brackets. Ensuring easy and effective communication for those with disabilities is by no means a fringe issue. With an estimated 10 percent of the world’s population, or around 650 million people,  living with a disability, this represents a significant communication challenge. And with current trends in population growth, medical advances and an increasingly greying population, this number will only grow. Which is why ITU will continue to work hard, around the world, to improve the quality of life and help build an inclusive information society. excerpted from http://www.itu.int/themes/accessibility ESSAY Question: Where is the future? Answer: It is in your hands! by Uche Yakhoub Everybody knows what I am aiming at even before I start the essay. You already know I am talking, not about you or your hands but about technology. And, specifically, about mobile systems. But technology first. Two incidents happened in two different parts of the world recently. In one place, Senators of a country gathered for a seminar and at lunch time one of them left his mobile phone on the table to go and serve himself food. Before he returned to his table, his mobile phone had vanished. He announced his ordeal and promised a handsome reward because of the cost of the terminal. A decision was taken that everybody, including everybody, in the hall should be searched but the ingenious effort yielded no result. I read the report in a newspaper so I could not ask many agitating questions.   Just before then, in another place, delegates to a seminar, few minutes after they left for their homes received a news item on their email that a pick-pocket delegate was caught by the cctv camera while he attempted to steal a co-delegate’s mobile phone and he was handed over to the police. The police however needed the owner of the phone to kindly come forward to help so the suspected mobile phone snatcher could be prosecuted. The cctv had recorded almost all information imaginable and both the owner and the suspect were completely profiled on the email news item. Of course the suspect was already with the police but the mobile phone owner knew about the attempt only when he read the news report on his email. What surprised him was that the amount of information supplied about himself and his telephone terminal left him in such a difficult position that he could not say he wasn’t the one who could have lost his telephone. We’ll take it up from there at a future date. Dramatic turn-around of Internet Top Level Domain is foreseeable  Internet regulators, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are bracing up to decide whether or not the strict rules on top level domain names can be relaxed. If they do, the limitation of domain names to represent individual countries [ .ng for Nigeria, .uk for United Kingdom, .it for Italy etc will expand to allow companies to turn their brands into top level domain names while individuals could also define their on terrain on the net.  In a manner of talking, the internet will become a virtual mass of real estate where everybody buys his/her own piece of land. Although the impact of the change is bound to be different for different countries of the world, what is clear is that it will affect humanity positively if individual governments prepare their geography for the information Society.  Already the IP version 6, IPv6, is expected to enable 340 trillion web addresses to be registrable and that means quite a lot. New awareness may require to be created at all levels of human communities creating new applications and opportunities. For access to web opportunities please click here   CyberschuulNews 293 ESSAY Between Internet Crises  and Challenges, where do we draw the line? by titi omo-ettu A few news items which made worldwide headlines in recent time are, to confess, quite baffling. We may call them challenges if our interest is to keep busy brainstorming on what next to do to meet tomorrow’s obstacles especially where an issue is not one that affects the whole world with the same effect. But the point is that they affect everybody all the same if not ‘similarly’. IPv6 One is the reality that the Internet will run out of IP addresses in 2010, two years away, as only 700 million separate addresses are remaining for allocation out of the 4.3 billion available on the present network . Having implemented an upgraded platform - called Internet Protocol version 6 - (IPv6) to access the 340 trillion new addresses, the remaining is now a challenge since the matter has moved out of the crisis zone. It was crisis for so long as nobody thought of it but becomes challenge the moment those who make it their lot to lead technology application for the rest to apply have nosed through the cloud on the matter. According to Viviane Reding, EU Commissioner for the Information Society, "IPv6 provides more addresses in cyberspace than there are grains of sands on the world's beaches," Well, .... or how do you describe 340 trillion, come to think of it? What brought about the crisis is that the earlier thought that IP would network our computers has given way to the present reality that we now will use IP for networking of other small and simple devices for energy management for lighting, intelligent building systems, remote-control sensors, pabx extensions and ultimately management of the entirety of human existence. To imagine that it has empowered the world to do all these cheaper, faster makes all the difference more so as flat rates for data are becoming increasingly common, and mobile devices for accessing Internet content are becoming more widely available. Porno The other is the matter of child pornography on the web. Discount the truism that adult porno may largely contain a high dose of hypocrisy almost everywhere in the world, the same cannot be said of a child-version of the malady. The news is that Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable have agreed to block access to Internet bulletin boards and Web sites that disseminate child pornography in the United States. And that negotiation is going on between the other providers and the New York Attorney General. But did the agreement just come from nowhere or just like that ? No! It resulted from an eight-month investigation and intensive operation in which undercover agents from the Attorney General's office, posing as subscribers, complained to Internet providers that they were allowing child pornography to proliferate online, despite customer service agreements that discouraged such activity. Verizon, for example, warns its users that they risk losing their service if they transmit or disseminate sexually exploitative images of children. After the companies ignored the investigators' complaints, the attorney general's office surfaced, threatening charges of fraud and deceptive business practices. The companies agreed to cooperate and thereby began weeks of negotiations. Truly and sincerely, the world has something to learn from the US regarding this particular crisis of the web. Or is it a challenge?   NeGSt tackles Interoperability issues on e-Government Systems With plans reaching advance stages on implementation plans for e-government systems in Nigeria, the National e-government Strategies is hosting a two-day Seminar to establish a framework on issues of interoperability in planned networks and systems. Inside sources indicate that with the increasing provision of eGovernment services by the three tiers of government, as well as the increased eCommerce activities of the private sector and in order to derive maximum benefits from the various initiatives, there is a need for the eServices to be 'interoperable' with each other, that is,

they must be able to work together, sharing compatible and meaningful information to support the tasks that their users need to perform.

The seminar, Nigerian eGovernment Interoperability Framework, Ng-eGIF is scheduled to hold 23 and 24 June 2008 at the Transcorp Hilton, Abuja. It is being organised by NeGSt under the auspices of National Information Technology Development Agency, NITDA and in partnership with The World Bank.

According to Dr Olu Agunloye, Executive Vice Chairman, National eGovernment Strategies, the proposed Workshop is expected to bring together stakeholders to review the Draft Ng-eGIF, with a view to producing a framework to be put in the public domain for further inputs before its final adoption.

The World Bank will lead with Brief Remarks on The Role of The World Bank in Sustainable Growth and Global Trends in eGovernment Interoperability, while the core issue at the workshop will centre on Policies, Technical Specifications and Service Delivery. The workshop will wrap up with revised Technical Interoperability Framework and considerations for further development.


NCS Conference lists Wimax Technology Standard for discussion

There are clear indications that the Annual Conference of the Nigeria Computer Society, NCS, holding in Abeokuta June 24 - 27 will devote attention to discussion on Wimax Technology standards. Renowned technology specialist Mr. Tony Ikemefuna, Senior Account Manager at LM Ericsson is expected to lead other senior IT professionals and entrepreneurs to examine various investment opportunities and technology requirements.

Leadership Lecture series

Microsoft Nigeria has announced it will host the first in the series of Leadership Lectures on June 25, 2008 at the Main Auditorium, University of Lagos. Time 12 Noon. The lecture will be based on the book: Africa 2025; what possible future for Sub-Sahara Africa? and it will examine the quality of leadership required to drive development in the present millennium.

Spread: Starcomms is unstoppable !!!

Clear signal of Starcomms’ CDMA network emerged at Abeokuta a few days ago bringing the locations covered by its network to 12. Others are Aba, Abuja, Asaba, Benin, Ibadan, Kaduna, Kano, Lagos, Maiduguri, Onitsha, and Port Harcourt. Starcomms, unarguably Nigeria’s fastest growing telephone network in the past twelve months, the provider has been pounding the ground from location to location leaving at every station low cost triple play services covering fixed wireless, mobile and internet services.

Reliability, Speed, and Spread:
Vodafone UK, Globacom Nigeria are Operators to watch.

 Vodafone UK has been rated the most reliable and the fastest network for mobile broadband according to LCC International, the largest independent wireless engineering company in the world. In Africa, Globacom Nigeria which recently picked a mobile license in Ghana for $50.1m, shortly after rolling out a GSM service in Republic of Benin is receiving very serious attention although not specific studies has yet placed a finger on its rating. On Telecom Answers Associates performance table, Globacom‘s profile is rising. 

The conclusion on Vodafone follows 28,000 network tests throughout March, April and May 2008 and comes a month after Vodafone UK announced it would start to do more to simplify mobile broadband for customers and talk less about theoretical possibilities and more about real speeds and actual benefits.  Globacom Nigeria on the other hand has already commenced various fibre projects which point to the direction of its top-of-the-brands target in local and international service provision. 

The UK study, commissioned by Vodafone UK, in locations independently selected, reports that the Vodafone UK network is the fastest and most reliable for file download and web page loading when using data cards or USB modems.  The sites tested across the UK reflected real customer experience of residential and business use, both indoor and outdoor, and included towns and cities of various sizes with locations such as railway stations, tourist spots, airports and motorway service stations. The fastest available equipment from each operator was used in the test.

Africa and the Broadband Conundrum: a transformation?

With dial-up, the experience of Africa’s Internet has been like trying to eat a meal by sucking it through a straw. It’s been slow and expensive for the individual user so it’s hardly surprising that it has thus far only attracted a relatively small band of users compared to mobile phones. By the middle of next year, much cheaper international fibre prices will come to East Africa and their impact will spread out across the continent starting in South Africa. Cheaper International prices will mean downward pressure on national backbone prices. All this lays the foundation for much faster retail broadband services and the possibility of delivering genuine Triple Play bundles in Africa.

Except in the larger markets, the potential for the Internet in Africa is in the hundred of thousands or the tens of thousands depending on the size of a country but this is a great deal larger than the current size of Internet subscribers which tend in the main to be in the thousands. One of the key shifts will be that an increasing number of ISPs and telcos will devise broadband and Triple Play offers that are targeted at Africa’s middle classes in their homes.

Last week saw the publication of the second edition of African Broadband, Triple Play and Converged Markets (the first edition was in 2005), a comprehensive 155+ page report that contains both consumer and industry data covering the key issues that will emerge as broadband growth takes off. The consumer data covers key questions from national and urban samples in 24 countries from both the high and low-growth markets.

Details are available at  http://www.balancingact-africa.com/publications.html