Essays of Titi Omo-Ettu

How did we totally loose out?The Challenge of Bharti
Of House of Reps, NCC & SIM Card
 Registration
The Business Opportunities of Mobile Services
Home may be where the problem is
Who is dominating who around here?
"‘F’ings just gotta change"
3G Network Systems: The Choice & Challenge that await Nigeria
2.3 GHz verdict: It was Them not Us
Big tree, small axe
2/11: Will The Senate Stick or Twist?
Time to Listen
Home may be where the problem is!

Essays of Abi Bilesanmi

Are convergence and regulation mutually exclusive?
Broadband in 2011: Show us the way to go
ICT in Nigeria: A Proposed Direction of Travel
ICT needs to extend to the Health Sector in Africa
If India’s future is bright, then so should ours
Can the Digital economy lift us out of crisis?
Welcome to the Future. No sleepwalking
The Rise and Rise of Twitter
Competition. The Catalyst for Growth in East Africa's Telecoms
Telecommunications: The rise and rise of India

Talking IP
by
'Segun Sorunke

Introduction to IPv6 Packet Format and Addressing
Quality of Service in VoIP
Session Initiation Protocol
Session Initiation Protocol
The Challenges of Multihoming in IPv6
The Challenge of NAT in IPv6
WiMax, Wi-Fi : Technology and Implementation
IPv6 Transition Technologies
IPv4 Address Exhaustion and IPv6
Routing in IPv6
IPv4 Address Exhaustion and IPv6
NAT and IPv6
Mobile IPv6
Stateless Auto Configuration in IPv6
Virtual Private Networks and IPv6
IPSec and IPv6
Features and Differences Between IPv6 and IPv4
Historical Background of IPv6
Intro to Talking IP
 

THE CYBERSCHUUL, Lagos

Training/Certification Programs
in Telecommunications

Crossover Telecom Training
- For persons who desire to cross from their discipline over to life in telecommunications industry
Telecom for non-Engineers
- For persons who have been employed into telecom firms from a non-telecom background
Basic Telecommunications
- For persons who read courses allied to telecom ( Elect/Elect; Computer [Science/Engineering], Physics, Avionics) at degree/higher diploma level but now going into telecommunications.
Advanced Telecommunications
- For specialist telecommunication engineers with sufficient exposure.

All Trainings hold in Lagos

Registration enquiries to titi@cyberschuulnews.com
Tel : 0802 322 4572  

Content
Basic Communication Concepts; Analog & Digital technologies; Networks, Networking, & Interconnections ; Fixed: Wired/wireless technologies ; Mobile and Cellular Networks ; Internet Applications, Role of IP ; Technology Standards TDMA[GSM]• CDMA• WCDMA ; Mobile Technologies in their generations 2G, 2.5G, 3G, 3.5G, 4G.; Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) ; Communications Media Options ; Infrastructure Management ; Satellite Communications Basic, VSAT, GPS ; Internet Applications and Multimedia Services ; Emerging Technologies and Standards ; Regulation, co-location of infrastructure, QoS, Number Portability; The Nigerian Telecom Network ; Telecom Vocabulary

For more details: contact

The Nigerian Communications Commission is the independent National Regulatory Authority for the telecommunications industry in Nigeria. The Commission is responsible for creating an enabling environment for competition among operators in the industry as well as ensuring the provision of qualitative and efficient telecommunications services throughout the country.

Over the years NCC has earned a reputation as a foremost Telecom regulatory agency in Africa. The Commission is hoping to catalyze the use of ICT’S for different aspect of national development.  The Commission has initiated several programs such as State Accelerated Broadband Initiative (SABI) and Wire Nigeria Project (WIN) to help stimulate demand and accelerate the uptake of ICT tools and services necessary for the enthronement of a knowledge society in Nigeria.

In order to achieve its mandate, the Commission has put in place the necessary licensing and regulatory framework for the supply of telecommunications services.

 VISION

An information rich environment, comparable globally in quality telecom service provision, regulated by a responsive, world-class organization.

 MISSION

To support a market driven telecommunications industry and promote universal access.  

We will achieve this through the consistent enforcement of clear and fair policies that protect stakeholders, ensure efficient resource management, share industry best practices and deliver affordable, quality telecom services.

Nigeria: New ICT Policy about to emerge

Nigeria’s Communication Technology Ministry announced during the week that it has completed a committee work to harmonise 16 different documents with which the various sectors of ICT are managed into one harmonised ICT policy draft. The draft is available for public viewing and comment at the Ministry’s website. 

According to the announcement, stakeholder comments on the draft policy will be reviewed and will inform revisions that are to be made to the policy. 

It promises that a public hearing - at which the revised policy will be presented and discussed - is planned to take place in the week beginning March 5, 2012.

ICT, Accountability Pressure, pals of the time

The theory that the overall benefits of ICT and especially of emerging social media aggregating into an empowerment tool for human beings came to a practical reality recently when Nigerians showed the Government at the centre that they were fed up with it lackluster performance. Anger, gigabytes of it, pent up and picked up, was unleashed as the resources of ICT’s were used for social mobilization and an effective management of their unity. Talk of unity among youths, labour leaders, artists, clerics, academics, traders and also the jobless.
 
The point was clearly made that Nigeria will be the same again and that it is not for nothing that the country claims leadership of sorts in the continent. What with the clear demonstration on the part of all protesters to minimize human casualties.
 
Claims were made that the federal government attempted to place a ban on blackberry and social network services but that was promptly denied by the Nigerian Communications Commission.


Government ‘clarifies’ ETO’os’ ‘Mobile Operator License’

The Government in Cameroon has explained that the telecom company owned by international footballer Samuel Etoo is only authourised to resell wireless services and is not permitted to operate a Mobile network. 

Cameroon’s telecoms regulator, Agence de Regulation des Telecommunications (ART), decided to make this clarification in view of popular information which went round the world that Mr. Eto’o owns a company that was heading for the position of Cameroon’s third mobile telephone operator. 

Eto’o was suspended for eight months a few weeks ago as sanction for leading some of his colleagues in the Cameroon Lions against football authorities on matters relating to unpaid match bonuses and allowances. Up till moment, he is not known to have apologised for his action as demanded by Cameroon’s football administration.


Logica sees red due to economic downturn in Europe

As Europe remains in the grip of a politico-economic meltdown, the impact on business, and consequently growth remains severe. This was further exemplified by the announcement late last year that Logica – the business and technology service company - is cutting 1,300 jobs as it tackles the consequences of slow European growth due to the downturn.

The company which employs 39000 people
across 36 countries said the cull is a result of lower than expected profitability of some of its longer term contracts is making an impact on the business. ‘We have undertaken a thorough review of our contract portfolio. In particular, we have taken a more prudent view of a small number of long-term contracts to reflect the more difficult economic outlook,’ it said.

The impact of non-sustainability of these long term contracts means the company will take a one-off hit of £39m in 2011 to cover the expected lifetime contract losses as a result of the likelihood of lower expected revenue on a small number of volume-dependent contracts with between four to six years still to run.

The company will make greater use of automation and offshoring in its infrastructure management business, leading to the loss of 450 positions in Sweden and the UK. A further 550 jobs are expected to go in the Netherlands and Belgium due to the lower demand for IT contracts in these regions.
 
BT hits jackpot (again)

Despite industry-wide accusation that it is building a monopoly on the provision of fibre-optic broadband which will leave Britain with a second-class infrastructure that trails other developed nations, it has been announced that BT will upgrade 178 telephone exchanges in the most of which will be in Scotland, East Midlands and Yorkshire a bid to ensure the government’s target of Europe’s best broadband network by 2015.  The upgrades will take broadband coverage to another 1.8 million homes, giving more than half the UK population access to broadband in 2012 and inevitably in upgraded areas, BT will act as a wholesaler to internet service providers.

Late last year, Prime Minister David Cameron and the cabinet met BT chief executive Ian Livingston for an update on plans to make fibre-based services available to more than 90% of UK premises in the next five to six years.

According to BT, most subscribers will have access to broadband speeds of up to 100Mbps or above but given that according to communications regulator Ofcom, the current average is 7Mbps and the prevailing austere economic climate, that target seems an aspiration a tad optimistic.

BT has always drawn criticism from the rest of the industry particularly on the thorny subject of broadband provision. TalkTalk's Group Commercial Director, David Goldie said of the company on this issue: ‘At all times BT is thinking about how it can recover the monopoly position that it lost many years ago. I don't think that is going to represent good value for the British taxpayer.’

 
Chinese have caught the consumerist bug

If the sprawling megalopolis, the giant-sized strip malls and the omni-present US brands - Starbucks, Subway, Sizzler, McDonalds in Beijing are not evidence of China’s full embrace of Western style cosumerism, it was reported this week that there were severe delays in opening Apple’s flagship store in Beijing's upmarket Sanlitun shopping district brought about by violence among hundreds of customers who had queued for hours for the iPhone 4S.

The police was called in and a couple of people were arrested following skirmishes which broke amongst the crowd who vented their frustration by pelting eggs at the store and shouted at staff to open the doors.

The police, it was reported, cleared and sealed off the area and employees later posted a sign in the window saying the iPhone 4S was out of stock to – inevitably to the crowd’s displeasure.

Given China is still a Communist country which, in recent times has shown disdain for U.S. business, it is hard to decipher what to make of this new-found and rampant consumerism. Mao must be turning in his grave.



How did we totally lose our way?
by
titi omo-ettu
 
Indeed is the question. But I did not ask the question.
 
It is a one articulated by Ms Funke Opeke, CEO of MainOne Cable Company in a Guests’ Comment Register at the breakfast meeting by CEO members of ATCON for Engr Victor Haffner’s 92nd birthday last September. Therein, she wrote: 
 
‘Very informative about the history of accomplishment that previously existed in the telecoms sector in the country. How did we totally loose the way?’. 
 
Most people of reasonable intellect let alone someone of such prominence in the industry will be left scratching their heads how, in a relative short period, things have degenerated so far and so fast. Funke Opeke, along with others, must have listened with sheer incredulity when she heard me say in a welcome address that less than 50 years ago, in 1963 precisely, the first telecom company in Nigeria provided the needed communication resources for the inaugural satellite launch by NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration, UAS) into space from the Lagos Marina, back to Goddard Space Flight centre in USA; and that some 10 years later, Engr Haffner and his team of Nigerians who provided the resources also conceived the NECOM House, the pioneering architectural feat of a rotating restaurant at the summit of a functional telecom building designed to be 37 levels above the ground floor. 
 
For answers, a semblance of understanding or some comparative analysis, I put the question ‘How did we totally loose the way?’ to Google Search but that venture yielded nothing. 
 
But to pretend to be ignorant of the root causes of this degeneration is simply burying one’s head in the sand. The issue is whether one wants to found solutions or meet the problem(s) with the customary shrug of despondency. 
 
The few people who write our history depict different era by those who have had the misfortune to rule us hence we chart our historical chart by the ‘Obasanjo’s regime’, ‘Shagari’s era’, ‘Gowon’s days’,  Abacha’s period, Babangida’s time, Obasanjo’s second time second term, etc. 
 
The difference between those heady days when Mr. Haffner worked and today is that back then, the states were not going to Federal Government routinely with a begging bowl to collect dues but rather, through ingenuous means, they generated revenue and contributed agreed sums to the central Government. This ‘funnel like’ system was effective and its reversal put the gearstick of progress in reverse. To understand the moment that precipitated this regression, we need to go back – as far back as 1966. 
 
The fellow who had the misfortune of implementing that retrogressive decision, is no other than the distinguished elder-statesman and prayer-warrior, General Yakubu Gowon (rtd.), who will have us believe that the only solution he thinks can be employed to solve our problems is ‘prayer’. 
 
If the only solution that the distinguished elder statesman can offer in the face of a multitude of problems is prayer then we should ask him to look at the issue more closely. One can say with a level of certainty that that solution does not work as I can think of no people that pray more than Nigerians.  The share number of billionaires we have produced through prayer empires attest to this. I also can think of no more morally bereft set of people than these people who package hopelessness and sell it to our people as hope. This is because if prayer is the thing, it is a deferral to a superior being for the manifestation of the good decisions that we take to protect ourselves given all the intellect the Almighty has endowed us with. It is difficult to rely solely on prayer when we deliberately depart from the original and efficient position where the states were self- sufficient and truly confederal. Is it difficult to know that? 
 
Today our President goes to church routinely to talk about affairs of state and to give more impression of hopelessness than hope. And to imagine that those young ‘brilliant economists’ who surround to impress on him that economic indices are more important than the wishes of Nigerians. And that our economy regarding fuel consumption is being threatened by small countries who share border with us and whose total population, consumption, and corruption quotient are only very insignificant fraction of Nigeria’s. 
 
What I find more galling is that no one sees it fit to challenge the respected General Gowon or indeed the success factor of his panacea. To be brutally honest I don’t think even he actually believes in the sacrosanctity of prayer and perhaps, just perhaps, a lack of leadership, aspiration and will might have something to do with the prevailing situation. 
 
Our failure to challenge orthodoxy cripples us. For our best moments come from discomfort and dissatisfaction because in those moments we are propelled to step out of what rubbish we are standing in and search for better solutions. A lack of aspiration means we are unable to truly judge a system either by its operations or manifestation.
 
Quite frankly we do not need an Army General to tell us what has gone wrong or how to solve them, we simply need anyone who works like a General – essentially a courageous leader.