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CyberschuulNews 350
President orders a repeat of 2.3
GHz Auction
Newspapers reported during the
week that President Yar Adua has directed that
the auctioning process that led to controversy
in a recent issuance of 2.3 GHz licenses to
three bidders including Mobitel Nigeria Ltd
(others are Spectranet Ltd and Multilinks Telkom
Ltd) be discarded and repeated. Using 'The
Nation' newspaper’s version of the report,
Presidential spokesman, Segun Adeniyi released a
statement to say President Yar’Adua’s directive
was coming on the heels of careful appraisal of
competent advice given on the matter. The paper
quotes:
"Having carefully reviewed
official reports and representations from
stakeholders, and after availing himself of
competent advice on the recent licensing of the
2.3 GHz Spectrum Band, President Umaru Musa
Yar’Adua has come to the conclusion that the
letters and spirit of the stipulated rules and
guidelines were not adequately complied with.
"In furtherance of the Federal
Government’s desire to assure all prospective
investors of its commitment to the observance of
due process and a level playing field, President
Yar’Adua has directed that the Nigerian
Communications Commission (NCC) should initiate
a fresh process for the award of the 2.3 GHz
spectrum band licences.
"The President further directed
that in performing its statutory function of
awarding licences for the band through a fresh
process, the NCC should make every possible
effort to ensure that its actions are seen and
perceived by all stakeholders to be open,
transparent and fully in keeping with the
requirements of due process and fair-play".
NEWS
Twitter off (again)
The world woke up last week
wondering why their favourite micro-blogging
site had not been letting them share their daily
routine with everyone else. The reason: Twitter
the website that lets people post updates
through 140-character messages and President
Obama’s favourite social networking site, had
been temporarily taken offline after what the
company believes is a co-ordinated attack.
According to the Twitter Blog,
the site has been the victim of a ‘Denial of
Service Attack’, which involved the company’s
servers being flooded with data in order to
disable them. Twitter went down on Thursday
morning, with the geographic reach of the site’s
downtime is unclear. It came back online for a
lucky few but users, who expected things a bit
quieter on Tuesday, had those expectations
dashed because for the second time in five
days hackers knocked the social networking site
offline.
It was reported that nothing came
from Twitter on Tuesday as the site fell victim
to yet another "denial of service" attack, which
overwhelmed its servers with bogus requests for
information.
Whodunit?
Twitter (along with Facebook and
LiveJournal) was the target of a
denial-of-service attack last week. In a blog
entry, Twitter says the coordinated attacks
appear to be geopolitical in nature. It alleged
that hackers targeted an activist blogger from
the former Soviet republic of Georgia by
flooding the sites with requests, causing them
to slow down or crash. The company alleged
attack again by hackers, following a series of
assaults that hobbled the site on Thursday. It
says the slowdown experienced on Tuesday was due
to defensive measures meant to nullify the
attack and they were working on better
solutions.
San Francisco-based Twitter said
Tuesday on its blog, ‘We're back up and
analysing the traffic data to determine the
nature of this attack.’ It further says ‘Twitter
continues improving system response such that
inevitable denial-of-service attacks such as
those we saw last week don't interfere with
normal operations,"
Twitter had 20.1 million U.S.
users in June according to research firm
ComScore. That made it the third most popular
social-networking site behind Facebook and News
Corp.'s MySpace ranked first and second
respectively.
NEWSAnalysis
A process, a ‘protest’, the law, and a
Presidential directive
The report that President Yar
Adua gave a final ruling on the controversy over
the 2.3 GHz license award is a happy
development. The President deserves a round of
applause for this action, as it is clearly an
improvement on his performance in the area of
decision-making in recent times and especially
from the observatory of telecommunications
sector. It is trite waging the merits or
otherwise of the decision but that a decision
has been taken, irrespective of which direction,
represents some sort of progress.
Point is that a bad decision is
marginally better than no decision especially
where investment and risk taking are involved.
It has taken more than two months to reach this
point and no doubt that some investors somewhere
are breathing a sigh of a relief now. Those who
are directly concerned can now sit down, re-plan
their strategies and move on. This is as
important in business, as it is in governance
but especially in telecommunications business
where the pace of change of technological
advancement coupled with modern management
dictate fast and effective decision making - a
case of you snooze, you lose.
Of course people are entitled to
various interpretations of the presidential
directive especially regarding the part of the
story that has been in public domain but kudos
has to be given to the President that he has the
duty to take a decision and he has discharged
that duty albeit belatedly.
This should not be misconstrued
to mean that it is correct to trample on the law
for self justification (as it seems) but in the
name of balance and given we are where we are,
it is best the industry accepted the prevailing
circumstances and moved on.
Begrudgingly, we should applaud
for Mr. President for this growing change in the
slow motion that we have almost become
accustomed to.
With this, Mobitel or whoever
else might be aggrieved will take decisions
which in spite of the setback will protect
further investment and the industry rolls on.
Destination: 2011. Insha Allah.
Opinion
The Rise and Rise of Twitter
by
Abi Bilesanmi
In this technological age you may
be surprised to find out not everyone is
overjoyed. For this group of malcontents the
enormous strides made in
information exchange between
peoples, its role in the realm of politics by
this I am particularly referring to the role of
social network sites in Barak Obama's historical
presidential victory or indeed the infamous
Iranian presidential elections of 12 June, is
peripheral verging on irrelevant. For these
modern day Luddites at a time when we are asking
whether social networks are a force driving
socio-political change or whether they pose a
challenge to more established media as an
effective means of disseminating information,
their focus seem to lie elsewhere.
You know you are on to a winner
when criticism emanates from established
religion. Where such criticisms arise, you are
almost guaranteed victory based on the
illogicality, inflexibility and the dogma of
your opponents. And so true to form, in the UK
Archbishop Vincent Nichols - the
Archbishop of Westminster, the head of the
Catholic Church in England - in an interview
with The Sunday Telegraph while decrying
the loss of loyalty and the rise of
individualism in British society which he said
threatened to undermine communities (on which he
happened to be right), decided to take a swipe
at social network sites such as Facebook and
MySpace as 'encouraging teenagers to view
friendship as a "commodity" and are leading them
to suicide'. He said the sites are leading
teenagers to build "transient relationships"
which leave them unable to cope when their
social networks collapse. He said the internet
and mobile phones were "dehumanising" community
life and blamed social network sites for leaving
children with impoverished friendships.
It is typical of religious
ideologues to not just rail against things they
do not understand, but to also throw the baby
out with the bath water. The background to the
Archbishop's swipe at social networking sites
was the death of 15-year-old schoolgirl who took
a fatal overdose of painkillers after being
bullied on Bebo, another networking site. The
Archbishop argues we are losing social skills,
the human interaction skills, how to read a
person's mood, to read their body language, how
to be patient until the moment is right to make
or press a point -
To argue as the Archbishop does
that while social networking
sites can improve communication, they do not
build rounded communities, is to completely miss
the point. Social network sites will not
substitute but augment and complement social
associations that people have family, school,
work etc. Why let facts get in the way of a good
rant? The fact that Facebook has more than a
million developers and entrepreneurs from more
than 180 countries; that every month, more than
70% of Facebook users engage with Platform
applications; that more than 200 applications
have more than one million monthly active users;
or that more than 15,000 websites, devices and
applications have implemented Facebook Connect
since its general availability in December 2008.
That the death of a 15 year old, tragic as it
is, throws the impact of social networking sites
into some kind of aberration, is laughable. It
is a clear indication the Archbishop refuses to
see social network sites beyond the individual.
There is evidence to support that businesses in
the US and the UK are using social media
to build awareness and relationships between
them and their respective markets. These
businesses see social media as an ideal resource
to further their brand in a meaningful,
high-reach and low-cost manner. They use tools
such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and
employee blogs and tweets to build awareness and
affinity with the market.
Contrary to the assertions of the
Archbishop, we have a global social media
platform for community building, collaboration
and knowledge sharing. This internal platform
has resulted in the huge development of organic
brand building, which has taken their newfound
voices and confidence as spokespeople to the
external social network airwaves.
The Archbishop may not be on his
own but the pace of technological pace carries
own unabated regardless. In their annual
ranking, Business 2.0 has compiled an
unabashedly subjective list of people which they
aptly named '50 Who Matter Now' where they list
people trends, and ideas that are transforming
the world of business, they ranked In this
illustrious list are Gina Bianchini CEO, Ning -
a site which lets users create their own mini
communities, complete with customisable layouts,
profiles, blogs, videos, and ads branded the
most exciting thing in social networking right
now - 48; Evan Williams CEO Twitter - the site
which gives each user a webpage, where short
text updates (known as "tweets") can be posted
to the site via IM, SMS, or blogging tools; and
Mark Zuckerberg Founder and CEO, Facebook who at
19-year-old Harvard student when he launched a
social-networking site called Facebook for the
in-the-know college crowd. Three years later
Facebook was the sixth most visited site on the
Internet, with some 24 million active users and
enough clout to turn down a reported
billion-dollar buyout offer from Yahoo ranked
34.
Again contrary to the
Archbishop's premonition of doom, Twitter CEO
Evan Williams in recent BBC interview revealed
that London is the top Twitter-using city in the
world with the UK second to the US in Twitter
use in terms of user numbers. Williams refutes
the Archbishop claim that Twitter creates a
false sense of community. He says "It's not
false, it allows people to communicate and is no
less false than using the phone." And as for the
challenge Twitter poses to journalism, Williams
says "It's not necessarily journalism -
certainly not in the classic case. But it does
enable people to report news and events as they
are happening. And often from the ground.’
"As we just saw in Iran, people
on the streets reporting what was going on. It
was newsworthy content that people were
tweeting. There's also a lot of commentary about
what is going on. But it doesn't take the place
of journalists or new because you still need
analysis, you still need verification of this
information - but it adds another layer to the
information ecosystem"
On the criticism by the
Archbishop, Williams says 'It's kinda silly,
"Anyone who says that isn't really familiar with
the service because it's about humans connecting
with each other. And often in ways that other
ways couldn't have. It's the opposite of
de-humanising."
When asked if Twitter just a fad,
Williams replied: "The only reason Twitter could
be a fad is if someone else comes along and does
it better."
Indeed
Cyberschuulnews 349
Mobile phone, Base Stations and
Health Concerns is focus of Tuesday forum in
Lagos
Discussants drawn from a cross
section of Mobile & Fixed Wireless operators and
Mobile phone vendors will assemble at the
Restaurant in Lagos Tuesday August 11 to examine
the issues of radiation from mobile phone
systems and base stations. Safety Standards,
Infrastructure and Social issues will form the
core of issue slated for discussion.
Top on the list of confirmed
presenters include William Saad, MD/CEO of IHS
Plc, Dr. Ernest Ndukwe, Executive Vice Chairman
NCC, Wale Goodluck, Corporate Services Executive
of MTN, Thomas Barmueller, Director MMF, Belgium
and Dr Abbas-salam of Dept of Radiotherapy,
College of Medicine, University of Ibadan.
It is being organized by ITWorld
International in collaboration with the Nigerian
Communications Commission (NCC).
US
cyber-security tsar steps down
The White House's acting
cyber-security tsar Melissa Hathaway has
resigned from her post, according to the Wall
Street Journal. She told the paper she was
leaving for "personal reasons" and would return
to the private sector.
The former strategist was
appointed as acting national cyber-adviser in
February and was expected to be offered the post
on full time.
Back in May, President Barack
Obama in his proposals to secure cyberspace
declared the nation's digital infrastructure was
under grave threat from a range of adversaries
and needs to be protected as a strategic
national security asset. The President went on
to announce the creation of a cybersecurity
coordinator role responsible for "orchestrating
and integrating" all cybersecurity policies and
the creation of a cyber-security office in the
White House. The President said he would
personally appoint a "cyber-tsar" Melissa
Hathaway, a former Bush administration aide was
appointed as acting senior director for
cyberspace. In April she completed a review of
cyber-security for the Obama administration.
However, in recent years, US
government and military bodies have reported
attempts to infiltrate systems by hackers
highlighted by the case of Gary McKinnon a
43-year-old British hacker who broke into 97
military and NASA computer systems claiming he
was looking for evidence about UFOs currently
fighting extradition to America for trial.
Ms Hathaway was widely regarded
as the person to fill that post after taking on
the role as acting senior director for
cyberspace for the National Security and
Homeland Security Councils in February.
At the time, Ms Hathaway said the
job ahead was "a marathon, not a sprint."
Her successor has not yet been
named by the White House.
Law Institute/NCC may cooperate
The Institute of Advanced Legal
Studies in Abuja has indicted desire to
collaborate with the Nigerian Communications
Commission, NCC to provide internship for
students of its Centre for Media and
Communications.
Director General of the
Institute, Prof. Epiphany Azinge, SAN made the
request at NCC when he visited the Commission
during the week. The professor said NCC was the
first non legal establishment his institute was
visiting and he also invited the Commission to
endow a chair in the Institute.
The Nigerian Communications
Commission was established by Military decree in
1993, revised by an act of parliament in 2003
and regarded as having discharged its mandate
under very commendable interpretation of the law
that established it.
NEWSANALYSIS
Mobitel raises charges of ‘license haram’
against federal government
Several newspapers reported
during the week that Mobitel which has been at
the centre of 2.3 GHz license impasse resorted
to court action to stop the purported
cancellation of a license it won recently. The
company, according to reports, saw the purported
cancellation as sinful and it wanted a court
intervention to enforce its right to the license
having been duly qualified to roll out services
under Nigerian laws.
A few analysts wonder if
Mobitel’s action is not moot since checks at
both the NCC and Ministry of Information and
communications reveal that Mobitel's license
which in any case was yet to be issued by NCC
was not at any time cancelled. Truth was that
the honourable Minister of Information and
Communications ordered that the completed
process which led to Mobitel’s merit for the
license be cancelled. NCC, it was learnt,
offered advice to the minister that she had no
authority under the law to effect such
cancellation without inviting litigation into
the process. There was no report that the
license award was ever cancelled but Mobitel
must have gone to court to pre-empt such action
if it was still being contemplated.
Other analysts saw the impasse as
a good interregnum for the fast growing industry
since it presents a very good opportunity to
test the National Communications Act which
strengths and weaknesses have been very well
documented.
Officials at the two feuding
seats of government must have been placed on
order to stop discussing the issue while
everyone waited for President Yar Adua who, it
was learnt asked for opinion of the Federal
Attorney general and Minister of Justice on the
matter. In between, it became public knowledge
that the petition on which the Minister of
Information and Communications based her action
was actually faked since the company whose name
was associated with the petition announced
publicly that it did not participate in the
auction let alone wrote any petition. The
Attorney general was also reported to have
advised the President that the Minister’s
directive could not be supported in law.
The President might have been
allowing time to solve the problem. With Mobitel
in court, the matter may require decision, not
time, to see it through.
CyberschuulNews 348
NEWS
NigeriaSat-2 goes up into space in 2010
The National Space Research &
Development Agency, NARSDA, celebrated its 10th
year anniversary during the week and hosted a
session of technical presentations on a review
of its decade of existence. Its director
General, Dr. S. O Mohammed while speaking on
‘Contributions of space science & technology to
sustainable development & economic growth in
Nigeria’ said NigeriaSat-2 will launch into
space in 2010 while the de-orbited Nigcomsat-1
will also return to space in 2011.
An Internet stressful week
Nigeria’s heavy users of the
internet found that it was a hassle using the
resource during the past week. And words flew
round that NITEL’s SAT-3 had been damaged, hence
the impasse. But all that was a fluke. Nothing
went wrong with SAT-3 to the extent of NITEL’s
culpability but there were indeed some
challenges to the SAT-3 submarine cable at
Cotonou where a major backbone provider has
intercepted the cable to provide service to its
Nigerian customers. NCC gave the explanation in
a Press Release (See Regulation below)
and promised to keep tab on the development.
Broadband not broad enough in the
UK.
Less than a week from Seacom
going live with a
submarine fibre optic cable
system linking East and South Africa
(Cyberschuulnews 347), the telecoms regulator in
the UK (OFCOM), in its largest survey ever
conducted, reported that not enough users are
getting the speeds they are paying for. Contrary
to the glossy brochures and ads of many ISPs who
had signed subscribers on a promise of
connection speeds of
eight Megabit per second (Mbps),
the survey revealed that early one fifth of UK
broadband customers less than 2Mbps.
The statistically viable survey
which
collected speed data from 1,600
users' connections UK wide between November 2008
and April of this year - amounting to some 60
million separate speed tests in all -
Reported that average connection
speed across the UK is 4.1Mbps and that less
than 9% of users received more than 6Mbps.
The comprehensive report in which
Ofcom worked with Samknows- a broadband
measurement firm- not only ranked the average
speeds of nine major UK ISPs, with Virgin Media
coming out on top - primarily because it
operates in urban areas and uses high speed
cable networks, it also ranked the UK a lowly
12th among the top 20 nations highest advertised
broadband download speed with Japan coming out
on top.
Charlie Ponsonby, Chief Executive
of broadband comparison site Simplifydigital
said 'the Ofcom study is important as it
quantifies accurately for the first time what
consumers have known for a long while - namely
that you are extremely unlikely to receive the
advertised broadband speed. Also for the first
time it makes a robust, like-for-like comparison
between broadband providers.'
Support for report and the
methodology of the survey was by no means
unanimous. BT, who ranked lower in the survey,
criticised the report saying said the sample
size was too small and the results were
"unreliable" (factually inaccurate as a sample
size of about 1200 in the world of research is
deemed statistically viable). It further argued
that because it provided rural broadband (unlike
Virgin's urban) its average speed was bound to
be slower than other ISPs.
ISPs on their part deemed the
report disappointing as the research did not
accurately reflect the full spectrum of the
industry but rather narrowly focused on larger
ISPs
However on the issue of
subscribers not getting what they pay for, Peter
Phillips from Ofcom said: 'It is critical that
people are told when they're new customers what
speeds they can reasonably expect.'
NEWSreview
Nokia in Iran.
A Case of Connection and Disconnections
Whether in established
democracies or in countries where there is a
struggle to achieve the democracy, it would
appear the issue for big business remains the
same - the bottom line - money and profit.
In Golnaz Esfandiari's report
'Nokia faces wrath of Iran's protesters' he
talks about 26-year-old Tehran resident Ehsan
who is waging a crusade against the Finland
based telecoms giant Nokia. He is mobilising
support through friends and family for boycott
of the company and products whom he accuses of
aiding the Iranian government in its "crackdown
against freedom" following the country's
controversial presidential election on June 12.
But before we brand this as the
assertions of a crazed loner of Lee Harvey
Oswald-esque leanings, the Wall Street Journal
reported that in a collaborative venture between
mobile phone companies Nokia and Siemens, they
built a 'monitoring centre' within the Iranian
government telecom monopoly used by the
authorities to monitor and intercept web traffic
thus making the telecoms giants complicit in the
crackdown that ensued.
The Wall Street Journal article
and indeed its assertions were quoted was cited
by dozens of local US and other international
media outlets including the BBC. Several social
networking sites particularly Facebook have been
catalysts giving the story 'legs' and have begun
calling for a Nokia and Siemens product boycott.
The BBC also reported that
Iranian government- well known for filtering the
net - had moved to do the same for mobile
phones. The report further stated Nokia and
Siemens had confirmed it supplied Iran with the
technology needed to monitor, control, and read
local telephone calls. Not attempting to court
Iranian public opinion with a denial, the
telecoms giants told the BBC that it sold a
product called the Monitoring Centre to Iran
Telecom in the second half of 2008 and the
system to Iran through its Intelligent Solutions
business, which was sold in March 2009 to Perusa
Partners Fund 1LP, a German investment firm.
Neither is Ehsan's claims the
ranting of an ant. There is real and anecdotal
evidence to support that the call to boycott
Nokia and Siemen's products is gaining momentum
among Iranians. Given the success of mobile
telephony n the developing world. It would
appear that the world's biggest player in the
manufacture of mobile handsets has 'backed the
wrong horse.'
In Iran where the flames of
dissent are being fanned, the product allows
authorities to monitor any communications across
a network, including voice calls, text
messaging, instant messages, and web traffic.
But Nokia Siemens says the
product is only being used, in Iran, for the
monitoring of local telephone calls on fixed and
mobile lines. Rather than just block traffic, it
is understood that the monitoring system can
also interrogate data to see what information is
being passed back and forth. Technology sure is
not biased. The same people who brought the
populace the hand held 'tool' of choice - the
camera phone are the same ones who provide the
government with "a standard architecture that
the world's governments use for lawful
intercept".
And Nokia's slogan? 'Connecting
people'. Indeed.
ESSAY
Competition. The Catalyst for Growth in East
Africa's Telecoms
by
Abi Bilesanmi
The notion of introducing
competition in any industry, particularly in the
developing world, has often been met with
skepticism. This is because it customarily
involved the government selling its stake in
such industries often bought to foreign firms
who subsequently become a monopoly because of
economies of scale and financial muscle. However
this notion is reported to have been turned on
its head in the telecoms industry in East
Africa. The leading markets in the region -
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania with 10million
subscribers, have all been test beds for
competition and are adjudged to be the most
liberal on the continent.
Tanzania and Uganda have pooled
resources in what is known as a unified
licensing framework. This has encouraged
operators to offer mobile broadband to their
subscribers who are now several hundred thousand
in number in each country and who now access the
internet via their mobile phone. Opening up
these market (Tanzania has issued seven mobile
licenses and Uganda has issued six) with a
multitude of operators has brought about in
increased investment and marketing spend and
this in turn has benefited consumers as the cost
of owning and using a mobile phone has fallen
Data gathered for a new report
from Balancing Act -
another source for information on
the telecoms, internet and audio-visual media
industries in Africa - reveal there
have been a fall in mobile
charges, opening the market to a wider number of
users. In Kenya, for example, the cost of calls
to other subscribers halved and the cost of
sending SMS text messages to subscribers on
another network fell by a fifth between the
third quarter of 2007 and the final quarter of
2008.
In the less populous and more
affluent Indian Ocean Islands of Seychelles,
Mauritius, Mayotte and Djibouti which are
renowned tourist destinations the effect of this
liberalisation is more pronounced. With The
Seacom international cable operational from 23
July 2009, the EASSy the fibre project due in
2010 and France Telecoms LION project that will
connect various of the Indian Ocean islands into
these new international cable awaiting approval,
the mainland East African countries currently
connected by satellite will see a large increase
in international bandwidth used as prices come
down his cheaper bandwidth price should lead to
cheaper Internet prices for consumers.
The sun is truly rising in the
East
CyberschuulNewsJoke
Confidence!!
A situation where 20 Senior Executives of a
Software Company board an airplane and are told
that the flight that they are about to take is
the first-ever to feature pilotless technology:
It is an unmanned aircraft. Each one of the
executives is then told, privately, that their
own company's software is running the aircraft's
automatic pilot system.
Nineteen of the Executives promptly leave the
aircraft, each offering a different type of
excuse.
One Executive alone remains on board the jet,
seeming very calm indeed, and asks for the
in-flight service to be served.
Asked why he is so confident in this first
unmanned flight, he replies :
"If it is the same software that is developed by
my company's IT systems department, this plane
won't even take off." !!!!
That is called Confidence!!!
CyberschuulNews 347
New Transatlantic Cable goes live
Thursday 23rd July 2009 the submarine
fibre-optic project designed to encircle the
African continent, connecting its coastal and
hinterland countries as well as islands reached
a remarkable milestone with the completion and
commissioning of the phase which links South and
East Africa to global networks via India and
Europe.
SEACOM, a privately funded and
over three quarter African owned company
announced its 1,28 Terabytes per second (Tb/s),
17,000 kilometre, submarine fibre optic cable
system linking Johannesburg, Nairobi and Kampala
with work to commission the final links to
Kigali and Addis Ababa to follow shortly.
Similar projects with potentials
to provide cheaper internet access in the
continent are in the pipeline. Two Nigerian
Companies, Golbacom and MainOne Cable Company
are known to be constructing similar
infrastructure to link Nigeria with the world
outside it.
In Nigeria, theft of mobile
phones now gets a check
The Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC,
during the week flagged off a scheme to curtail
the menace of mobile phone handset theft in
Nigeria when its chairman, Alhaji Ahmed Joda
commissioned a registry and anti-phone theft
system for Mobile phones in the country.
The registry is to be maintained by Netvisa and
the service is designed that a mobile phone
which is reported stolen will be rendered
useless as it cannot be connected to any
telephone network in the country.
The service will be at no cost to the
subscribers but subscribers are expected to
register their 15 digit International Mobile
Equipment identity (IMEI) numbers with the
Central Equipment Identity Registry (CEIR) to be
managed by Netvisa through which any mobile
phone reported stolen will be blocked from all
the networks.
TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
The Office - Allegedly a Place of No Fixed Abode
Having not decisively delivered
the 'paperless office' information technology
moves the game up another notch in the quest for
the 'office -less' office as internet companies
are expanding their mobility portfolio in a bid
to help businesses improve communication while
simultaneously meeting the challenges posed by
inefficiency. Long before the advent of the
economic downturn and the ensuing drive to keep
costs down, mobile working had become the norm
as the business environment dictated that quick
and easy internet acces was essential for
executives and employees to effectively manage
workloads the working day regardless of where
they were.
Mobility which allows roaming on
3G networks by providing fixed and wi-fi
broadband network access, fully protected by
corporate VPNs and firewalls and fully supported
24/7 is pretty expensive but back in May
Easynet Global Services introduced the new
Mobile Data service that will offer flat rate,
unlimited Internet access via 3G networks
helping business customers to increase their
productivity away from the office . The Easynet
Managed Mobility Portfolio, it is said, will now
allow workers to easily and securely communicate
whilst on the move, delivering significant cost
savings and increased productivity
The devil, as always, in the
detail.
The service is available in the
UK, Netherlands, Sweden, China, Singapore, Japan
and United States would be rolled out in
Germany, France, Spain and Italy soon.
Telecommunications: The rise and
rise of India
by
Abi Bilesanmi
In the face of a global economic
downturn the telecommunications industry remains
relentless in harnessing the power and
opportunities of information technology to drive
productivity in anticipation of future economic
growth via h the 3G and WiMAX spectrum auction.
With the objective of providing an opportunity
for telecoms experts - infrastructure, broadband
solution and value added services providers,
telecom operators- and investors to exchange
views on a host of issues concerning the
industry and opportunities for further growth,
The Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry
of India (ASSOCHAM) under it’s Expert
Communications Convergence Committee and in
conjunction with India's Department of
Telecommunications, Government of India held an
annual Summit the “5th ASSOCHAM GLOBAL TELECOM
SUMMIT” on Thursday 23rd & Friday 24th July,
2009 in New Delhi.
The Minister of State for Communication &
Information Technology Shri Sachin Pilot, in
attendance of big name partners such as Cisco,
Intel, Ericsson inaugurated the Summit- with a
lecture on “Boradband for Digital Democracy and
Inclusive Growth” in which he said he hoped that
the benefit of voice and broadband connectivity
will be available on mobile handheld devices.
The availability of these technologies, he
argued will offer the convenience of mobility
with rich multi media content of the internet..
He attributed this rapid growth to various
proactive policies initiated by the Government
with the active contribution of the industry
India has become the second largest wireless
network in the world after China with over 4.25
million mobile connections and huge growth in
the sector had made India one of the most sought
after telecom manufacturing destinations. Its
rapid rise in mobile technology exemplifies
blue-sky thinking matched with practical
policies on the ground. Its Department of
Telecommunication (DOT) has been able to provide
state-of-the-art world-class infrastructure at
globally competitive tariffs.
The telecoms industry has
collaborated in the efforts of reducing the
digital divide by extending connectivity to the
unconnected areas thus improving accessibility
to its citizenry. The result is that the
teledensity which was merely 5% five years ago
has now reached about 40%. Such increased
accessibility in a population of 450million
people implies phenomenal growth not just in
Indian telecom industry sector but with ripple
effect extending to the entire Indian economy of
the country -something Titi Omo-Ettu in his July
14 essay 'Politics and reality of telephone
subscriber registration in emerging markets'
advocated should be replicated in Nigeria.
CyberschuulNews 346
Nigeria’s Justice Minister clears
air on Frequency Licensing
Anatomy of executive muscle flexing at the top
Two credible newspapers reported
last week that the Minister of Justice Mr.
Michael Aondoakaa has, after a long wait for him
to speak up, advised President Umar Yar' Adua
that the Minister of Information and
Communications’ directive to the phone
regulator, NCC, to cancel a concluded auction
process cannot have a support in law and should
therefore be ignored.
The papers quote Aondoakaa to
have insisted that the "powers of the minister
under the Wireless Telegraphy Act in so far as
they relate to communications were vested in the
NCC"
Although the verdict is not
unexpected (A senior advocate had unambiguously
given a point-to-point explanation of the law),
industry analysts had waited for such formal
intervention in an executive muscle flexing
which sprang up in the telecommunications
industry in the past few months. A Minister of
cabinet rank gave a directive to an independent
Commission for telephone regulation to discard
its (the regulator’s) decision on a completed
auction process and the regulator advised the
Minister to either withdraw his directive or
re-issue it since it did not have a place in
law. The Minister went talking instead of
re-issuing the directive.
Although the important issue in
the disagreement should have been the rare
opportunity presented to test the law, Nigerians
were made to be entertained by the personal
altercations arising for the impasse. In
Nigeria, personalities count sometimes more than
society and mis-rulers are oftentimes allowed to
go away with crass illegality with attendant
damage to life , property and, especially,
investment.
The story goes beyond the
immediate issue and Nigerians know it hence the
high decibels of its entertainment value. It
became an entertainment-rich news item which
some reporters played up as though it would
adversely affect industry fortunes. Analysts, on
the other hand, felt it was good for the
industry that such actions that may otherwise
test the laws are infact good for the industry
to thrive.
With the Justice Minister’s
intervention, the matter, in terms of real
issues, may have been laid to rest.
The remaining is history which
will be told another day.
Kenya gets a call for Number
Portability
The new CEO of Telkom Kenya has
called on the regulatory authorities of Kenya to
consider number portability as one option of
improving telecom service delivery. Mickael
Ghossein who until he was recently named the big
boss at Telkom Kenya served as Chief Executive
Officer of Jordan Telecom Group argues that
number portability will give phone users a wide
choice and put operators on check to enhance
good quality service.
Kenya's phone authority, CCK, may
turn a deaf ear since it has indicated it would
wait till all operators endorse the move. That
may be waiting for ever.
It is not usual for operators to
sleep with the idea of number portability but
they may not have a choice to make where the
authorities make up their mind to go ahead. In
such circumstance, a wait for their acquiescence
hastens implementation and reduces bottleneck
arising from forced intervention.
In Nigeria, the authorities
invited operators to discuss number portability
in 2007 followed it up with a document on its
intension to implement in 2008 and recently
invited consultants to support its effort in
executing a phasal implementation of Mobile
Number Portability.
Internetiquette goes to Airspace
Now that USA airlines are
perfecting provision of online browsing while
airborne, AirTran airways has provided its
passengers with internetiquette - a guide on how
to behave with decorum on-line. AirTran is
reported to have internet available on all its
136 aircrafts now and every seat pocket in the
passengers’ cabin has been equipped with the
literature.
It is believed that provision of
Wi-fi on line is a potentially good perk
especially if the economic downturn makes flying
passengers reduce in number. Chances are that
internet savvy businessmen will always have to
fly and to save time by working as they fly.
Delta, Northwest, American, are some airlines
which are known to have implemented Wi-fi on
flight and at different stages of covering their
fleet in America.
Short of at take off and during
landing it can be business as usual for top
executives when they fly.
Products
Great phones are still emerging
Sony Ericson and AT&T have worked
together to put two phones which offer ultimate
photography and social networking experiences in
the market. They are: Sony Ericsson C905a Cyber-shot(TM)
and the W518a Walkman(TM). With 8.1 megapixel
camera, the highest resolution ever in a phone
from AT&T, and advanced features such as face
detection, autofocus, xenon flash and GPS
tagging, the C905a Cyber- shot(TM) camera phone
helps photo enthusiasts simplify their lives by
using the device to capture moments on the go
while also taking advantage of the latest
wireless services on the fastest 3G network
where available. The W518a Walkman(TM) phone, on
the other hand is the total package in
personalized entertainment, revealing a new way
to use Facebook(R), conversational messaging,
highly interactive music features, and a 3.2
megapixel camera.
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