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  • From: "Dykki Settle" <dsettle AT intrahealth.org>
  • To: <grhits AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [grhits] FW: Internet transforming Africa
  • Date: Fri, 18 Jul 2003 09:52:57 -0400

Title: Message

Found this great article on Internet Telephony in sub-Saharan Africa.  We expect to move our phone system to Internet telephony before the end of this calendar year, and roll it out to field offices with sufficient bandwidth in the first quarter of next.  Does anyone else have any experience with Internet telephony in the field?

-

Dykki

 


Source: Toronto Star
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1058134211457&call_pageid=968350072197&col=969048863851

Internet transforming Africa

Voice over Net opening up new business avenues
But authorities see it as a threat to their power

G. PASCAL ZACHARY NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE  Jul. 14, 2003

ACCRA, Ghana—The Internet bubble has long since popped in the United
States, Europe and Asia. But in parts of Africa the Internet is serving as
a powerful force for change, primarily by allowing companies and
individuals to make international telephone calls far less expensively than
through conventional channels.

Calls in and out of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the world's
most costly, strangling business opportunities and burdening ordinary
people. Services have been tightly controlled by state-owned telephone
companies, many of which are rife with corruption and incompetence. African
governments also imposed high tariffs on international calls, seeing it as
a lucrative source of revenue.

But now, thanks to what is called voice-over-Internet, phone alternatives
are flourishing, drastically lowering costs and expanding opportunities for
business and consumers in some of the poorest places on earth — even as
they pose a competitive threat to government-sanctioned telephone companies

Sending telephone calls over the Internet is gaining ground in Africa
because it makes possible a range of new services, linking the sub-Saharan
region to the world's major industrial centres in ways unimaginable only a
few years ago. And better digital connections, mostly via satellite, are
raising the hope that Ghana — the most peaceful country in a West African
region besieged by civil wars and ethnic strife — may become the regional
hub for an information-technology industry.

"As Ghana improves its connectivity to the outside world, it has the
potential to become for Africa what Bangalore became for India," said Paul
Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who recently visited Accra
to survey the nascent high-tech scene here.

Secretary General Kofi Annan, at a recent U.N. conference in New York,
delivered a message that developing countries also need to include wireless
access, known as Wi-Fi, in building an Internet system.

"It is precisely in places where no infrastructure exists that Wi-Fi can be
particularly effective," Annan said, "helping countries to leapfrog
generations of telecommunications technology and empower their people.''

As the movement advances, though, many government-owned telephone
companies, which dominate wired service in most African countries, are
fighting a rear-guard action.

Internet telephony "is presented as the salvation for business and society
in Africa," said Oystein Bjorge, chief executive of Ghana's national
telephone carrier. "It is not.''

Bjorge, a Norwegian telecommunications consultant hired recently to do
battle against the Internet telephone services, says it wreaks havoc with
the economics of state-owned phone companies. Here in Ghana, the national
phone company is waging a sporadic campaign against its own citizens who
use the Internet to make or receive telephone calls from America and
Europe, periodically turning off the lines of those suspected of doing so.

Three years ago, the government even jailed the heads of some of Ghana's
leading Internet providers. Though later exonerated by a court, the
dissidents fear another crackdown.

"Internet telephony is changing the whole power structure," said Francis
Quartey, chief technology officer of Intercom Data Network and one of those
jailed. ``The dangerous thing is that the power elite is responding out of
fear and ignorance.''

Acquiring reliable phone service is essential, foreign investors say, which
is why they bypass the state-owned telephone company. Ghana Telecom has an
order backlog of more than 300,000 lines; bribery is the fastest — indeed,
usually the only — way to obtain new service. Even those with service
suffer from frequent outages and inaccurate bills. Roughly every other call
results in a busy signal, an indicator of what Ghana Telecom calls "network
congestion.''

Under the circumstances, Internet telephony seems positively fabulous to
many weaned on Africa's creaky systems.

"Internet gives me control over my destiny," says Sambou Makalou, chief
executive of Rising Data. "My business needs to be up 24-7; we can't get a
busy signal.''

Busy signals are common in Ghana because the public phone networks are
overloaded. As recently as four years ago, a telephone dial tone was among
the scarcest resources in the country, which had fewer than 200,000 phone
lines in a nation of 19 million.

Few people realized how much demand for phone service was waiting to
explode until Ghana's most successful wireless company, Spacefon, launched
in 1996. Before it started, executives thought the potential customer base
was probably 3,000 people, at most 12,000. Seven years later, Spacefon has
more than 300,000 subscribers.

The country's total phone lines are now approaching 750,000, roughly
two-thirds of them wireless. But completing a call is still difficult,
especially between rival networks (there are five), and neither Ghana
Telecom, nor the country's legal wireless operators offer a reliable
connection to the Internet.

In response to these limitations, private businesses have built scores of
data networks, relying on satellite- and radio-based Internet-access
systems. These private networks at first only carried data.

But telephone service became appealing because of the high network costs:
Companies typically pay from $2,000 to $5,000 a month for a robust
connection to the Internet, an enormous sum when economic output per person
is only about $400 a year.

"I'm paying $2,000 a month for Internet access, so I want to use the
technology to the fullest," said Austin Addo, chief information officer, of
Ghana Link Network Services.

Addo's company, which began operations here early this year, helps the
government calculate duties on goods imported into the country, relying on
frequent updates, via the Internet, of product values. The company's
partner is based in Madrid, Spain, so Addo uses a standard device to make
international calls over his computer network. He isn't billed for the
calls, which would otherwise cost him roughly 75 cents a minute, including
the cost of line.

His telephone calls are not really free, since he pays $2,000 a month for
Internet access. But he is still saving lots of money because he can speak
as long as he wants without worrying about the cost.

"Five years ago to get this level of communication," he said, "I'd have to
fly to Spain — several times a week.''

Such productivity gains have been a cause for celebration almost everywhere
in the world. But official anxiety over Internet telephony is widespread
throughout Africa.

Neighboring Togo, for instance, allowed Internet telephony until the end of
last year, when the government cracked down on behalf of Togo Telecom. So
many foreign calls in tiny Togo were being routed over the Internet that a
small "com" centre — ubiquitous in Africa, offering calls for a fee — took
in $10,000 a month from just two phones.



  • [grhits] FW: Internet transforming Africa, Dykki Settle, 07/18/2003

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