Thank you Momodou Camara for forwading this message.
Banjoloh


>From: Momodou Camara <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: (Fwd) Searching for a Dial Tone in Africa
>Date: Sun, 6 Jul 2003 11:57:54 +0200
>
>------- Forwarded message follows -------
>
>http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/05/business/worldbusiness/05VOIC.html
>
>New York Times
>
>July 5, 2003
>
>Searching for a Dial Tone in Africa
>
>By G. Pascal Zachary
>
>ACCRA, Ghana, July 3 -- 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 government-owned telephone companies, many of
>which are rife with corruption and incompetence. 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, sharply 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 to the world's major industrial
>centers 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.
>
>Last Thursday, at a United Nations conference in New York,
>the secretary general, Kofi Annan, 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," Mr. 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."
>
>Mr. Bjorge, a Norwegian telecommunications consultant hired
>recently to do battle against the Internet telephone
>services, said it wreaks havoc with the economics of 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."
>
>Despite this opposition, American companies are
>experimenting with new ventures in Ghana, seeing if
>enthusiasm for Internet telephony can transform local
>technology entrepreneurs into a force for genuine economic
>advancement.
>
>For example, Rising Data Solutions, which is based in
>Gaithersburg, Md., introduced a call center here last month,
>where a dozen Ghanaians -- trained in American-style English
>-- are trying to sign up customers in the northeastern
>United States on behalf of a wireless phone company. At
>least three other call centers are expected to open in Accra
>later this year, all relying on Internet telephony instead
>of telephone carriers.
>
>Internet telephony also aids companies like Newmont Mining,
>which is searching for gold in Ghana, the second-largest
>gold producer on the continent, after South Africa. To help
>manage its operation, Newmont plans to link its operations
>within Ghana to the wider world through the Internet.
>
>Acquiring reliable phone service is essential, foreign
>investors say, which is why they bypass the government-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 failures 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 -- which has
>failed so far to make serious inroads into the American
>telephone market because of lower voice quality -- seems
>positively fabulous to many weaned on Africa's creaky
>systems.
>
>"Internet gives me control over my destiny," said 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
>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, was introduced 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.
>
>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.
>
>Mr. 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, so Mr. Addo uses a standard device to make
>international calls over his computer network. He is not
>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 and
>particularly rife in Ghana. At a public meeting in May, held
>at the largest Internet cafe in Accra, a regulator defended
>the government's latest campaign against those who use the
>Internet to bypass authorized telephone providers. "The
>players have been apprehended or will be apprehended soon,"
>said Bernard Forson, deputy director of the National
>Communications Authority of Ghana.
>
>The government is not opposed to any particular technology,
>Mr. Forson explained, but merely wants "regulated entities
>to provide telephone service," not unlicensed and untaxed
>wildcatters.
>
>Other African countries face a similar quandary, aware of
>the appeal of Internet voice service but fearful of its
>damage to the state-owned telephone company.
>
>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"
>center -- ubiquitous in Africa, offering calls for a fee --
>took in $10,000 a month from just two phones.
>
>But some African countries have embraced Internet telephony
>as a way to end decades of frustration. In Nigeria, for
>example, the government has not officially approved
>telephoning over the Internet but looks the other way,
>partly to ease congestion on its authorized networks.
>
>Still, the legal confusion surrounding Internet telephony
>has prompted some to avoid it. Affiliated Computer Services,
>which is based in Dallas, set up shop in Accra two years
>ago, relying on a private satellite connection to the
>Internet that supports both a data and a telephone network.
>Today, it is one of Ghana's largest private employers, with
>1,200 people and plans to hire another 700.
>
>While the company runs call centers in Jamaica, Mexico and
>India, it does not intend to do such telephone work in
>Ghana. "We can't use satellite lines" because of the brief
>delay in hearing a response, said Tom Blodgett, the
>executive who started the Ghana operation. And for now, he
>adds, "there is no suitable wired alternative." A legal one,
>anyway.
>
>But for all their efforts to restrain the movement, African
>telecom companies are probably fighting a losing battle.
>
>"Periodically the police confiscate equipment or the telco
>turns off phone lines," said Russell Southwood, a
>London-based consultant and publisher of a weekly newsletter
>on Africa's telecom scene, Balancing Act's News Update. "But
>it's about as hopeless as Canute trying to turn back the
>tide."
>
>Copyright (c) 2003 The New York Times Company.
>------- End of forwarded message -------
>
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