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NCC Curtails Products Promotion

Starcomms introduces iZAP Express Card - an Internet Enhancer to its subscribers

A complement to the speed of the 3G EVDO Mobile Internet systems in the form of an enhancement data card has been introduced into the Nigerian market by Starcomms. It is called the iZAP Express Card.

Proprietary to Starcomms in Nigeria, iZAP Express Card is also being launched at this time in a few countries in South America and Asia. Starcomms is marketing it in five packages with varying access and validity periods. Mr. Maher Qubain, CEO of Starcomms said midweek in Lagos that the activation packs come in various packages including a 100 hours subscription package valid for one month.

Starcomms Plc, is Nigeria’s first publicly quoted telephone provider and largest deployer of CDMA standard of digital mobile telephony. It is spreading service across the country complete on triple-play doing mobile, fixed and internet with optimum quality that makes the spread regarded as steady and assuring. It is present in 17 major locations with signal flow into another 19 on stone-throw access.

It was forecast by local analysts in December 2007 as one of the operators to watch in 2008 and it must have proved the forecast right several times over.
 

Another notch for improved access to bandwidth in Africa as Google backs O3b Networks 

O3b Networks stands for ‘other 3 billion’ (people to receive internet access by satellites) Networks. There are indications that O3b Networks is making plan to provide cheap, high-speed Web access to 3 billion people in emerging markets of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East using satellite. Target take off date: 2010. 

News emerged from Europe last week that Google, HSBC Principal Investments, and cable operator Liberty Global have joined forces and thrown their weight behind the rather ambitious plan. 

In spite of the latency which satellite communications is susceptible to, bandwidth costs for telecommunication operators and Internet service providers should be reduced if the dream comes through.  

Poor power supply hinders telecom business

Two years after receiving operating licenses, 210 ISPs (Internet service providers) have yet to launch services in Nigeria, Telecom Answers Associates’ CEO, Titi Omo-Ettu said recently. The statistics is derived from the Industry report of ISP Audit of 2006, commissioned by the Nigerian Communications Commission and carried out by Omo-Ettu's firm. The study included all 528 ISP licensees issued from 1996 to 2006. In addition to those who have failed to launch service, another 96 licensees went out of business prematurely due to poor public power supply, Omo-Ettu said. Eighty percent of ISPs that went out of business linked their misfortunes to the power crisis, he noted. 

 There is a huge gap between demand and supply of bandwidth in Nigeria, according to Omo-Ettu. "The gap is brought about by consumers' inability to buy bandwidth, and this inability is accentuated by an indescribable and worsening access to basic public electricity supply across the entire country," he said.  Excerpts from the ISP Audit Report placed the number of operating ISPs at 117; an additional 99 licensees were in business at the time of the report but not operating as internet providers, he noted. "If power problems are resolved, many ISPs would thrive in spite of the high cost of bandwidth," he said. "Power is the only problem, so to say." Changing the name of the present government-owned Power Holding Company from the National Electric Power Authority is not enough to change the sector, Omo-Ettu said. He charged the engineering society members with taking a position on the power crisis.

Culled from NIGERIA TODAY ONLINE

NEWS REVIEW
Nigeria to host Commonwealth ICT Summit: What gains to Nigeria?

ICT Summit 2008 of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization, CTO, will hold in Abuja, Nigeria on October 6 – 10, 2008.

The summit is one of the International talkshops which rotate among and within regions of the world with the objective to further the reach of ICT resources to all peoples of the commonwealth.

Although a CTO summit in particular may not be one of the big deals of ICT global events, it makes significant meaning for a country like Nigeria to host such gathering of world players now that the country is announcing nominal figures in excess of 50million of telephone lines. Nigeria’s regulatory regime, on its own merit, has in a few ways become a model that earns it attention and therefore instant endorsement should it request for a hosting right. So, it should sound right that Nigeria begins to count as endorseable host of these telecommunication events.

Like in many spheres of world economics, developing countries are not known to derive optimum advantage from hosting global events beyond the level of participating officials improving their education and little perquisites of office by attending the meetings. Until recently, older generation of officials merely went on those pilgrimages without contributing anything to the decision of those world bodies. So nobody would ever endorse their countries for hosting rights. While some went out primarily to make estacode-inspired private shopping, a good number are known to even sleep on their chairs when others talked. But that is now changing with the coming of liberalization when players in both government and the private sector started making a combined impact here and there.

In other climes, it is not unusual for hosts of such events to count a few major sectoral advantages that the hosting rights fetched their markets beyond the ordinary personal gains of participating delegates. It is in that regard that the world may be expecting what Nigeria would be counting at the end of this high level discussion forum holding on its ground.

Should any be counted, it would have raised Nigeria’s rating, once again, in global reckoning. For example, there is no reason why our organizing officials cannot begin to use the opportunity of hosting ICT summit XYZ to champion discussion which will make the world body to motivate operators to include provision of special assistive technologies to our people who have disabilities? It is not too early to ask that the GSM guys in Nigeria subsidize the production of assistive technologies which can make access affordable to visually impaired persons just as Vodacome did a few days ago in South Africa?

An international forum which we are hosting is a good platform to use in making inroad into such major industry leap, beyond rhetoric, and Nigerians have the right to ask what the forum will leave behind when the delegates leave. The GSM guys would, very rightly, subsidize sports, music, and maybe, very soon, religion crusades since that is what would sell their products, ours being a developing economy. They will not normally go out of their way to subsidize developmental projects which do not increase their profit. And it is not their business to originate the ideas of how to truly develop our people. Our people love entertainment  and hype. Yes. But that is sympthomic of underdevelopment  and what investors do is to latch into it and do business.

It is the business of our officials to do that, not by wanting to participate in business but by goading business people towards true development using a forum like ICT Summit 2008.

Etisalat to launch service soon

It announced an advance launch in March 2008 and has been pounding the industry with media presence. Other providers in its class are Globacom, Mtel, MTN,and Zain.

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GIANT STRIDE as
Daarsat, 40-Channel, Comes on Stream

Daar Communications Plc, operators of AIT-TV have signaled intension to commission a multi-channel TV transmission originating from Nigeria and beaming digital signals via satellite to cover news, sports, entertainment, technology and business on Direct To Home platform. 

AIT's daring and aggressive proprietor, Aleogho Dokpesi, watched on TV, took media executives on a facility tour of the world class transceivers installed in his Abuja studios last Friday. Going by what those who saw the facility said, it is clear that the TV station has taken broadcasting to the next level. 

The news is however, strictly speaking, more about AIT's promoter and proprietor than about AIT. Here is an investor who has taken daring decisions to improve society at a time when those who claim commitment to development via the wide path of partisan politics went about sleeping only to wake up and make loots. Truly and thoroughly Afrocentric, Aleogho Dokpesi, formerly Raymond Dokpesi sits atop the Daar Communications conglomerate to fashion programmes which seek out Africa and Africans and, in the process, raised by several notches, society’s perception of politics, entertainment, sports and even religion. He motivated his workers to return to their Africanness by adopting their native names thus, in another stretch, destroyed the fallacy that the best of that industry was a preserve of  people from the large tribes that make Nigeria. 

The field of play is not like internet where the players are computers but made of human beings. So he has had to wade through the shenanigans of several layers of bad-belly’s both in official and private life to make the point that he has been making. 

Chances are that that fellow is motivated more by vision, passion and share guts than by motives of commerce and personal comfort to have reached  where the dream of his conglomerate is today. Compare that with those who sit down to contrapt TTA [a.ka. third-term-agenda], Pentascope, Transcorp etc etc.

Before long Daarsat  will be joined by an across-the-country multitude of agents who will be selling integrated decoders capable of receiving digital terrestrial and satellite signals.

Free Laptops to youths at ITU Forum

It is believed that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has a grip of 70% of the world’s browsers market while Mozillar’s Firefox has 20%.

MTN, ZAIN say No to Infrastructure Sharing

Afrispa reports that MTN and Zain Zambia have refused pressure from the Communications Authority of Zambia (CAZ) to share network infrastructure, with both operators claiming it would be difficult to maintain quality assurance. The CAZ has been urging the companies to share infrastructure in order to boost the expansion of services in rural regions but MTN and Zain have both stated that they will proceed with individual expansion plans and are not prepared to consider a shared solution.

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What’s up in the Industry?
Zain: Migraine at Dawn!!


Although the news has not been commonplace on the newsstands, it is just because that is how the newsmaker wants it to present. But the fact really is that Zain in Nigeria [formerly Celtel, formerly Vmobile, formerly V-Networks, formerly Econet Wireless] has been sharing its bombardment of the airwaves and newspaper pages with a familiar boardroom squabble at its head office.

Boardroom players have their way of thinking that what is their problem is theirs and would rather that no-one pokes nose into it. They forget that although they are private industry players, what good or bad gets played across their mahogany tables ultimately affects those of us who buy their products. If as a result of some guys' profligacy, we are made to buy a one minute of phone airtime at N39 when we think it should not have been more than N20, then we have a stake. And a right to know.

An obscure newspaper broke the news and it was found to be real.

It is the familiar storyline. For cash crunch reasons, a company goes up into the waiting arms of a bigger player. The bigger player comes in to take a big chunk and wants to, as it should rightly do, dictate all the tune. Then he starts paying fat fat bills on purchase items which the original players, now the underdogs, consider as big bite into their hitherto smiles to the bank. The small players make a case, usually a good case, but they end up being swallowed up and the big guys have their way. That is the way of business, particularly in economies that are lowly rated on issues of good governance.

Each re-branding brings along some huge expenditure which are nothing but rip-offs on virtually everybody concerned except the big owners.

That really is what the story reads like but short of the concern of Nigerian phone users who get ripped off on a continuous basis the story is really not one to make any notable headline. Specifics: Mr Oba Otudeko, a strong local investor who had become a small player by the various buy-ins is leading a group of unhappy underdogs to attack the decision of the big player to hire a drab facility for a princely $30million. Why Dollars?, why hiring,? why now? Those are the issues he wants answered and he also wants the Court to stop the big players from continuing such profligacy that accompanies all re-brandings. He and his group fume that it is unfair path for a firm that has not paid dividend in seven years. True or false?

But there is an issue here. The minority players in Zain in Nigeria who have been saying that the company is spending unjustified huge dollar-denominated figures on local purchases keep repeating that in seven years of its existence, it has not been able to pay dividends to its shareholders. And they blame it on endless re-branding and along the line, graft.

That can only an aspect. There is the other aspect, namely:

Obong Victor Attah, former Governor of Akwa Ibom State told a Lagos audience through a representative in 2006 that his Government which invested $60.7million in Econet in 2001 reaped $204million when it divested its shares in 2006. How do we reconcile that with the story that Zain, (Celtel, VMobile, V-Bnetworks, Econet ) has not been paying dividends to its shareholders?

There must be a lie somewhere. And it should be explained because here, public money has been involved. A lie is a lie no matter how many times it is told.

What’s Cooking?
‘Vodaglo’ may be up!!


There is news in the air that Nigeria’s Mike Adenuga, owner of Globacom, may have been seeking 50% of South Africa’s Vodacom to make up what may eventually be called ‘Vodaglo’. The business tycoon whose investment in a Lagos – London marine optical fibre is already in the making is known to have vast investments in oil, banking, real estate, and telecommunications. Mr. Adenuga had to elope to Europe in the final days of the Obasanjo regime on account of his turning a cold shoulder to the former President’s attempt to modify Nigeria’s constitution so he could earn a third term in office and perhaps eventually stay in power till death. Obasanjo’s antigraft goons made an attempt to put up Adenuga on trumped up charges but he escaped with his two children into Europe via Ghana.


When in the early days of his regime, President Obasanjo schemed to find anyone who could front for him to buy NITEL, his secret search party hit at Mike Adenuga but Obasanjo who hails from the same state of Ogun as the tycoon smacked his secret search agents for bringing ‘that fast boy’. While Adenuga made another route into establishing his own telecommunication empire, Obasanjo never backed out of his interest in NITEL until his fronts destroyed the company.

Mike Adenuga sure has very good reason to have his kind of ambition. He may not stop until he owns a pan-African telecom outfit.

EDUCATION
30 'universities' declared as illegal

There are newspaper reports that the National Universities Commission, NUC, has declared 30 institutions which claim to be Universities as unapproved and therefore illegal.

Please click here to see the list of the affected names

Nigeria retrains 4,000 teachers in IT

Information was revealed last week that Nigeria’s high-grade InfoTech Training Institute, Digital Bridge Institute (DBI), has offered ICT appreciation training to more than 4,000 professors and lecturers from tertiary institutions across the country.

Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice Chairman of NCC, made this known in Lagos at the AFRITEC Forum organized by ITWorld Magazine to discuss the future of broadband infrastructure in Nigeria.



He said the training was offered to the lecturers under the Digital Appreciation Programme for Tertiary Institutions, ADAPT, designed to equip lecturers with the basic knowledge of computer skills and Internet application knowledge to ensure they use these facilities to teach and encourage their students to use them whenever possible.

DBI is a creation of the Nigerian Communications Commission.

Senate distrusts BPE on appointment of BNP Paribas as Advisors

Senate Chairman on Communications, Senator Sylvester Anyanwu, has charged that BPN Paribas cannot be a worthy Consultant/Advisor to BPE on the renewed move to find a core-investor for NITEL. He claims to have good information on a record of the Consultant who in the past did not do a commendable work just as a good number of its current staff were former executives of BPE.

A few weeks ago, a telecommunications consultant had argued in Lagos that BPE has no reason not to use local expertise since it is naturally expected that it should have been pairing foreign advisors with local experts in the past efforts on NITEL. Titi Omo-Ettu, who picked holes in various aspects of NITEL’s re-privatization process, said investigation reports on the past services of BPE’s advisors showed that the Agency is both incompetent and manifestly anti-Nigeria. In his words, ‘We expect BPE to have been insisting that foreign advisors partnered with indigenous expertise in the past exercises. Could it be that Nigerians who partnered with the foreigners in the past can still not do the job? If they cannot, Nigerians deserve to know who they are and they should be able to say what their problems are. It is not rocket-science to privatize NITEL. We should have had enough of the waste we have incurred on hiring these Advisors who produce nothing but pains for us’

Siemens shuts down business in Telecommunications;
Gets power contract in Nigeria


Siemens, a company which started operations some 161 years ago has now stopped operating as a telecommunications company and sold its telephone business to various vendors.

But it is in full gear at home in Germany in railway, high-tech medical equipment and also in power systems under which it signed a deal with the Government of Nigeria a few days ago. The Nigerian deal came under curious circumstances as the Federal Government pretended to have sacked the company from further business deals last December. Several local newspapers are asking questions on the unclear circumstances under which the relationship was revived. But government officials have so far applied the military approach of keeping mum as if it owes no obligation to the public on its decisions. Chances are that it opens up as the heat keeps mounting. Trust Nigerian newspapers and public commentators for a good run.



In 1847, 31-yearold Werner von Siemens and an engineer Johann Georg Halske started what became a global brand in telecommunication equipment vendoring. It made a late entry into Nigeria in the mid-seventies to take crumbs of a telecommunication contract which government gave in large chunk to ITT. It eventually displaced ITT by cooperating better with Nigerian officials. It operated via representatives who were regarded as corrupt but who found their match in local counterparts. Government, for unclear reasons, announced a sack of the company in December 2007, following a flawed, apparently diversionary accusation of Nigerian officials on charges of bribe-giving and again restored relationship with power projects to which Siemens had diverted its attention since Nigeria liberalized its telecom industry mid-nineties.


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ATCON signs on Consultants as partners for COMBIT 2008
Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria, ATCON, has signed on three seasoned events managers – Faces & Profiles Limited, Exxcon Limited and TextServe Limited – as consultants to its forthcoming International Telecom Expo, ComBIT 2008, taking place in Lagos. The Association says the Consultants are already working with it to ensure that the quality of the event is significantly raised to higher standards.

INDUSTRY ALERT
Beware!
Incidents of Phone Hoax may increase.

There are indications that fraudsters who send text messages to announce fake winnings and attractive rewards may be on cyberprowl. It has been moving across Africa in recent times and chances are that it spreads. The technical team of Telecom Answers Associates progenitors of Cyberschuulnews have received more than a few enquiries on how the authors want to achieve ends which in the opinion of the Consultants must have originated from the minds of tricksters. It is not impossible that the authors of such requests are merely desiring to increase the ingenuity and depth of their operation and believing that the technical know-how certainly resides with publishers of the e-magazine. There is no clear evidence on which country the mails originate and the Consultants are not really interested in finding out.

What is important is to let the public know that it is not safe to give out personal information to whoever is making request for such by text messages which purport generally to come from telephone operators.

Although phone users may be tempted to blame such problems on operators in the false belief that their systems are insecure, this is not true as all operators are open to such abuse by fraudsters all round the world.

In South Africa last week Thato Ntai, forensic administrator, MTN Forensic Service whose company had faced the embarrassment during the earlier week had to say ' We have had similar scams recently. When you do receive such calls, ask for some type of proof and take down their phone number and their details, but do not give them any personal details.”

Recently Nigerian officials woke up to the reality of a need to record information about users of all telephone services and that may be the first step into stemming the tide of such maladies. But that is coming after 57 million telephone lines have been allocated to unknown persons.



NEWS ANALYSIS
Nigerian commentators offer reasons why
‘TRANSCORP cannot manage NITEL’

One reason why Nigerians appear not to believe in Transcorp as a genuine private sector company let alone one to revive NITEL was recently explained in Lagos.

Titi Omo-Ettu, a telecommunications engineer and consultant, told a media audience recently that the circumstance of establishment of a few so-called private companies which were creations of the Obasanjo government made it impossible for many Nigerians to respect them as private sector players.

According to him ‘You will observe that analysts have contempt for the creation of Transcorp and a few other companies which the expired government created. That is because they were really established with ulterior motives and we knew it. Transcorp, Nigcomsat,. Galaxy Backbone and a few others are not respected by informed analysts as private sector companies even though they bear such legal titles. We analysts, especially those of my genre, do not normally get critical of private companies since they are owned by private investors and individuals. But we have the right to, and we are, critical of government owned companies since we are bona fide shareholders and there is no AGM where we can go to ask questions about our companies’

Transcorp is one such company which we shall never agree is a genuine private sector player because somebody wanted to take all of us for a ride and use our collective commonwealth to enrich himself. Now he has failed. And we thank God He gave us the wisdom to manage that fellow to failure ’

It is the contention of the engineer that having been part of several advice study-groups to government to stop creating private companies in telecommunications after the NITEL debacle, he cannot possibly see himself agreeing with any such creation which has government shareholding no matter under what pretensions. He promised to release a document which goes by the title of ‘A file on NIGCOMSAT’ at the appropriate time ‘to enable Nigerians see what evil went into the creation of such octopus and potential drain pipes of our resources’.


NEWS FROM OTHER LANDS
India makes a radical move on VoIP
India’s telecom regulator has recommended that calls made over the Internet be allowed to be received on telephones rather than just on computers, a move that would increase competition in the fast-growing telecom market.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said Internet telephony was quite popular, even though the country has just 11 million Internet subscribers compared with about 326 million mobile and land-line phone connections.

At the moment, Government restricts direct connectivity of Internet telephony with phone lines. Internet telephony service providers generally offer cheaper call rates, encouraging businesses such as call centers to use their services.

In Nigeria, the regulator, NCC, has never restricted the use of technology in any way and that makes it a model for other administrations.

China or The Internet? Who will blink first?

China is one place where right from the onset of internet had been the world’s champion of cyberspace censorship. What China does not want on the internet is regarded as ‘nonsense’ officially and it is to be blocked off.

Even as the International Olympic Games holds in Beijing, China, the International Olympic Committee pressured China to allow access to blocked sites but the world was reminded that the IOC had agreed to let China block them in the first place. China is therefore not yielding.

China seems to be telling those who believe that free access to information is a key ingredient for economies to thrive, reduces corruption, makes governments more efficient and holds corporate executives accountable, that they should go say all that ‘in America and not here’.
 

CyberschuulNews 301

TELECOM/IT EVENTS
eNNOVATE : set to take e-governance to the Next level

Nigeria’s highly rated Expo on technological innovation, eNNOVATE will hold in Abuja on September 23 and 24.

This year, the Expo will be examining the relationship between technology on one hand and leadership, governance and development on the other. The theme also explains why the event is moving out of its traditional base of Lagos to Abuja where the federal government sits.

eNNOVATE normally unravels technological tools and applications and this edition, according to John Awe, the Project Director, beams light on “technology tools which can help to make governance more systematic, transparent and consequently more effective.”

It is packaged by XLR8, a communications consulting firm, with sponsorship of world class technology driven firms including Cisco, MTN, IBM, Nokia, Hewlett Packard, APC, Ecobank, Starcomms, Reltel, Mtel, MTS and many more.

For more information, please contact john.awe@xlr8.com.ng

FOR THE RECORD

NEWS re-used
'We Are Focused on Capturing African Market, says NigComSat'

The above headline is borrowed.

It is the most attractive of the headlines with which several newspapers reported a recent media briefing by Nigcomsat Ltd. Major newspapers reported during the week what, in summary, amounts to a Nigcomsat’s spokesman unveiling the challenges which the company has been facing. The spokesman is reported to have explained that NigComSat was conceived to reduce the huge money spent by oil, banking, Internet service providers and other telecommunications operators in acquiring bandwidth from international service providers and to stem the tide of capital flight. It has had difficulty in delivering its mandate largely because 'stakeholders and the market had misunderstood and misconstrued the intention of the organisation'. So it is asking the public, industry, stakeholders and the market for understanding.

Another nice version of the report quoted the spokesman to have said that Nigcomsat had made conscious efforts to connect several government agencies to the satellite grid but "their responses have been very low, so 'in the interest of the country', the organisation decided to enlist the support of a multilateral organisation especially to see its e-learning programme through. That multilateral organization is UNESCO.

A few days earlier, the satellite service company had celebrated its Agreement with a broadcasting outfit in a deal to provide 'quality communications' service in Nigeria and virtually all newspapers in the land reported the story.
 

ELSEWHERE IN AFRICA
SEACOM launch ready for June 2009

SEACOM, The 15,000km undersea cable linking east Africa to Europe and Asia is now confirmed for launch in June 2009, several months ahead of the 2010 World Cup which South Africa is hosting. The company will begin laying cables in October this year, while work on connecting sections of the cable will start April 2009. 

The cable will provide 1.28Tbps of broadband capacity. South Africa's second telco, Neotel, has secured the rights to control the cable's use in South Africa.  

The project is costing USD650 million and will be funded by Nedbank Capital, a division of Nedbank and Investec Bank. The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development has a 25% stake, as does Venfin. and Herakles Telecom, while Convergence Partners and the Shanduka Group each holds 12.5%.

 

NEWS About NITEL

In 4 months, NITEL is back, running!! Kevin Caruso, the new CEO of NITEL who Transcorp hired recently to put NITEL to shape says in four months time, a turnaround of the company would be in the horizon. Few weeks into his assuming office, Caruso told an audience in Lagos 'We have studied the network extensively. We know what needs to be fixed. And it is not just a matter of fixing it but sustaining the tempo. We have identified the black spots on the network, in the switches, in the transmission and in the billing. Within three to four months, we will get the network running.'  (CyberschuulNewsJoke : Bydway, do a web search on the name Kevin Caruso. You are likely to hit at the profile of an electrical engineer turned pilot. You may also hit at another who is both an engineer and magician. There is also likely to be the various websites of the team of one Kevin and another Caruso who are entertainers. It is not known if any of these bears a relationship with the NITEL’s edition. In four months time, it may be clear if indeed it is the engineer/magician/entertainer that fades off somewhere and resurrects in Nigeria. Four months is November by which time NITEL would have flown to very high altitudes or Nigerians would have been thoroughly entertained. Mark you, Caruso talked of getting the 'network', not the 'business' running. So distinguished passengers, please fasten your seatbelts!!). Pentascope Again!!! Committee on Communications at the Upper Legislative House, The Senate, says it will reopen the Pentascope file and review it. Chairman, Senator Sylvester Anyanwu, who is still sounding very angry about the Pentacope rip-off  seems ready to commence another probe of what went into and out of the Pentascope deal – a management contract which took NITEL from the stretcher to the mortuary all in 18 months.  NITEL is worth $2.2billion. A Lagos based Analyst says although the value of NITEL’s assets might have plummeted, its true value is actually the worth of its First National Operator’s License which has in no way devalued. Titi Omo-Ettu, a telecommunications engineer and consultant told a select media audience in Lagos that those who spent 8 years to gradually devalue NITEL didn’t achieve their objective after all because they were wrong to be rating NITEL as just any other company down the road. ‘It is the First National Operator’, he says, 'and that makes a world of difference. To value it is to evaluate the worth of the license it is holding. In 1999 it was $2.5billion, today it is $2.2billion. Not much of a devaluation. Let no one bring some advisors to tell us bla bla bla and think they can sell NITEL to themselves for a pittance. We shall ask the Court to order that their Advisors' report be published for public scrutiny. Enough of all this nonesense '