Season's Greetings From Balancing Act's News Update

The pace of change in the telecoms and internet sectors in Africa in 2013 has seemed to accelerate. The established and accepted ways of doing things are being challenged on all sides by both global trends and by things that are particular to Africa.

Infrastructure plans continue to fall into place. Liquid Telecom looks close to realizing the imperial fantasy of Rhodes by having a fibre route from the Cape to Cairo. Google has built a metronet in Kampala as a way of accelerating market development and looks set to roll out more. Somalia will shortly be connected to international fibre. Fibre to the home or whatever implementations are growing in number: Telkom South Africa has graciously signaled it will join the party, late as ever. Soon as one senior executive told us, the experience for corporate customers in most African capitals will be almost the same as in Europe of the USA. In the meantime, vandalism and power cuts bedevil the progress made.

There is a very real danger that as the digital divide begins to be closed that it will turn into a power divide. There are many efforts at the level of the base station and small-scale local delivery but none of the policy dynamism that has driven the telecoms and Internet sectors in the best performing countries. Many Governments seem to have a rhetoric about joining the Information Society but lack the political will to solve the energy requirements to deliver it. A recent workshop of 42 African countries convened by the African Development Bank for an initiative called Sustainable Energy for All in Africa may be a good thing but we want to see what it's actually going to deliver on the ground.

source: www.allafrica.com

GVG-SGS stages workshop for West African telecoms regulators and fiscal authorities

Global Voice Group (GVG) reports that the first regional workshop on new telecoms regulation tools and electronic  fiscal solutions for West African telecoms regulators and tax administrations, staged in Abidjan, was a great success. The event was a joint initiative of GVG and Société Générale de Surveillance (SGS).

The organisers said the event attracted representatives from the Telecoms Regulatory Agencies and Tax Administrations of Ivory Coast, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroun, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Niger, and Togo.

For this first workshop of its kind in West Africa, GVG and SGS decided to invite both telecoms regulatory agencies and tax administrations in order to gain a deeper understanding of their common challenges, including control and protection of the telecoms sector's revenue. Issues more specific to each authority were also addressed in details, such as quality of service monitoring tools, telecommunications fraud management, new regulatory tools in the context of IP convergence, and new electronic fiscal systems.

Many of the technological tools presented by GVG and SGS were also demonstrated in order to allow participants to appreciate their potential and effectiveness.

According to M. François Dugué, Senior VP at GVG and one of the workshop's principal organizers and presenters: "Telecommunications are a key growth sector in Africa, strong in some respects and vulnerable in some others, particularly in the context of IP convergence. These workshops give us a great opportunity to take stock of the latest improvements in terms of governance technologies. GVG is an active participant to the ITU's Study Groups and our company also sponsors major events such as the African Telecom People.

source: www.biztechafrica.com

Latest Sub-Saharan Africa Telecoms Investment Opportunities – Business Monitor Release Brand New Whitepaper

Business Monitor has just released its latest analysis on Sub-Saharan Africa Telecoms Investment Opportunities in their new whitepaper ‘Sub-Saharan Investment Opportunities in Telecommunications: Risk/Reward Analysis’. The whitepaper includes Business Monitor’s country comparative risks and rewards ratings tables for the telecoms industry in each country, as well as specific analysis on three countries of interest within the region - Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa - including key data and the latest trends and developments.

After a wave of regulatory penalties, including fines and a ban on promotions, Nigeria's mobile operators have announced plans to expand and upgrade their networks to cope with strong subscriptions growth and increasing data usage. Business Monitor expects this trend to continue over the medium term as the market is forecast to add around 45mn new subscribers in the five years to 2017. Meanwhile, consolidation and, subsequently, transition to LTE technology appears to be a growing trend among tier two telecoms service providers in Nigeria. Business Monitor sees this as a positive development as, through consolidation, tier-two operators are able to gain scale for bigger network deployments while the transition to LTE should enable them to compete better with 3G HSPA+ offerings from the GSM operators.

Kenya's mobile operators will prioritise high value services over aggressive network expansion into underserved areas to improve their profit margins. 

source: www.prweb.com

seasons greetings from balancing acts news update

The pace of change in the telecoms and internet sectors in Africa in 2013 has seemed to accelerate. The established and accepted ways of doing things are being challenged on all sides by both global trends and by things that are particular to Africa.

Infrastructure plans continue to fall into place. Liquid Telecom looks close to realizing the imperial fantasy of Rhodes by having a fibre route from the Cape to Cairo. Google has built a metronet in Kampala as a way of accelerating market development and looks set to roll out more. Somalia will shortly be connected to international fibre. Fibre to the home or whatever implementations are growing in number: Telkom South Africa has graciously signaled it will join the party, late as ever. Soon as one senior executive told us, the experience for corporate customers in most African capitals will be almost the same as in Europe of the USA. In the meantime, vandalism and power cuts bedevil the progress made.

There is a very real danger that as the digital divide begins to be closed that it will turn into a power divide. There are many efforts at the level of the base station and small-scale local delivery but none of the policy dynamism that has driven the telecoms and Internet sectors in the best performing countries. Many Governments seem to have a rhetoric about joining the Information Society but lack the political will to solve the energy requirements to deliver it. A recent workshop of 42 African countries convened by the African Development Bank for an initiative called Sustainable Energy for All in Africa may be a good thing but we want to see what it's actually going to deliver on the ground.

source: www.allafrica.com

Mandela's Passion for Telecoms Growth in Africa

As the world celebrates the life and times of late President Nelson Mandela of South Africa, the icon of anti-apartheid, it is noteworthy to also remember him for his contributions to telecoms development in Africa.

Today, the world celebrates late Nelson Mandela for his political struggle and achievements in bringing peace to South Africa and the rest of the world. Yes, it is worthy to remember him for his political struggles, but there is also need to remember him for his passion and contributions to telecoms development in Africa, and this could be best captured from his speech at the opening ceremony of Telecom 95, the 7th World Telecommunications Forum and Exhibition in Geneva, on October 3, 1995.

The Value of Telecommunications According to Mandela at the opening ceremony of the Telecom 95, "As prisoners on Robben Island, when we were deprived of newspapers we searched the refuse bins for the discarded sheets of newspapers which warders had used to wrap their sandwiches. We communicated with prisoners in other sections by gathering matchboxes thrown away by warders, concealing messages in false bottoms in the boxes and leaving them for other prisoners to find. We communicated with the outside world by smuggling messages in the clothing of released prisoners. Not even the most repressive regime can stop human beings from finding ways of communicating and obtaining access to information."

This, he said, applied in equal measure to the information revolution sweeping the globe. No one can roll it back. It has the potential to open communications across all geographical and cultural divides.

Nevertheless, one gulf will not be easily bridged - that is the division between the information rich and the information poor. Justice and equity demand that we find ways of overcoming it. If more than half the world is denied access to the means of communication, the people of developing countries will not be fully part of the modern world. For in the 21st century, the capacity to communicate will almost certainly be a key human right, he said.

source: www.allafrica.com

Africa well positioned for leap to 4G LTE

With its capacity for innovation, Africa’s mobile network sector is well positioned to drive the explosion in service offerings on the back of 4G LTE implementations.  This is the view of Sherry Zameer, Africa and Middle East Head of telecommunication solutions for Gemalto, world leader in digital security.   Zameer’s comments follow the AfricaCom conference held in Cape Town last week, which was attended by some 8000 delegates from over 100 different countries.

“Africa is largely unrestricted by legacy platforms and onerous regulations, and so has the capacity to leapfrog standard 3G migrations, to embrace LTE and all the benefits of better quality service and content possibilities that the next generation platform provides,” Zameer continued.

While LTE penetration stands at less than 0.003 percent of the market in Africa, Rwanda, for example, is poised to implement LTE from the get go.

“Successful LTE implementations in Africa will depend on how well the issue of spectrum is addressed and how well wireless services (radio) work with LTE to deliver the quality of service required,” Zameer added.

“Africa has a track record of innovation and being first to market in many instances (e.g. M-Pesa and dynamic tariffing) and I expect that the implementation of 4G LTE will be no different,” he said.

While the continent is poised to take telecoms growth to a whole new level, questions among attendees at the conference remain as to how generate profits on new service options, once LTE is deployed

source: www.biztechafrica.com

vodacom seeks entry into Ethopia,s telecom sector

South Africa’s Vodacom Group has opened its first office in Ethiopia in an attempt to establish its presence in the country.

The company, which has a strong presence in several African countries including Lesotho, Mozambique, Tanzania, DRC, Nigeria, and of course South Africa, has described Ethiopia as the “most fantastic telecoms market on the continent.”

“We would invest here tomorrow… One operator, 80 million people, the economy growing at 7% – it’s a great market,” Vodacom Group chief executive officer, Romeo Kumalo told Reuters.

The Telecoms firm says it will soon apply for a license to offer value-added services – all other services aside from standard voice calls. This is seen as an attempt to position itself in anticipation of the government’s opening of the country’s telecommunications sector to private investors.

More than 200 Telecoms companies have applied for similar licenses from Ethiopia’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, but only MTN group has been granted the authority to offer value-added services. But MTN is yet to set up shop in the country.

Ethiopia’s state-run Ethio Telecom continues to maintain a monopoly in telecoms and refuses to liberalize the sector saying the USD 321 million generated by the company every year is used to finance infrastructure projects. Foreign investors continue to show great interest in the sector, which Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn has described as a “cash cow”.

Ethio Telecom recently made deals with Huawei and ZTE to expand the mobile phone infrastructure throughout the country. The two deals will see the introduction of a 4G network in Addis Ababa and expansion of mobile phone and 3G internet access throughout the rest of the country.

Growth in Ethiopia’s Telecoms sector is indicative of the entire continent, which has seen tremendous growth in recent years with subscribers increasing significantly between 2011 and 2012.

source: www.zegabi.com

African mobile penetration hits 80%

We tend to have certain paradigms about the “developed world” and the “developing world.” Including, of course, media-fed images of Africa as a place of almost irredeemable poverty, deprivation, and pain.
 A new report on the African telecommunications market highlights that mobile penetration in Africa hit 80 percent in the first quarter of this year and is still growing at 4.2 percent annually. That’s faster than anywhere else in the world, the report says, and Africa is, after Asia, the world’s second-largest market.

Which means that today, more than eight in 10 Africans have a mobile phone.

In part, that’s driven by a massive reduction in the costs of owning a mobile phone: The average revenue per user for telecom companies has dropped 80 percent between 2001 and 2011. Economies of scale have taken hold now as the basic infrastructure has been built out, and more competition by independent (not state-owned) telecoms has driven down prices.

That’s good for Africans, of course, and good for the market in the long term as well. And there’s still a lot of room to grow.

source: www.venturebeat.com

African mobile penetration hits 80%

We tend to have certain paradigms about the “developed world” and the “developing world.” Including, of course, media-fed images of Africa as a place of almost irredeemable poverty, deprivation, and pain.

A new report on the African telecommunications market highlights that mobile penetration in Africa hit 80 percent in the first quarter of this year and is still growing at 4.2 percent annually. That’s faster than anywhere else in the world, the report says, and Africa is, after Asia, the world’s second-largest market.

Which means that today, more than eight in 10 Africans have a mobile phone.

In part, that’s driven by a massive reduction in the costs of owning a mobile phone: The average revenue per user for telecom companies has dropped 80 percent between 2001 and 2011. Economies of scale have taken hold now as the basic infrastructure has been built out, and more competition by independent (not state-owned) telecoms has driven down prices.

That’s good for Africans, of course, and good for the market in the long term as well. And there’s still a lot of room to grow.

Most mobile connections — 62.7 percent, or almost two thirds — are basic 2G voice and SMS services, the report says. Of the remaining third, about 27 percent have access to 2.5G for low-speed data, and just 11 percent have 3G access — never mind LTE.

As more and more infrastructure is built, however, data services and connection speeds are increasing. Data revenue for telecoms has grown 67 percent in the key African countries of South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria in the past few years. And while smartphones are cost-prohibitive for some, current penetration is at 20 percent and is projected to grow fast — by almost 600 percent in Nigeria alone by 2017.

source: www.venturebeat.com

Nairobi hosts East African telecom investment summit as sector enters critical phase

The TMT Finance East Africa 2013 Conference will be held in Nairobi amidst unprecedented fixed-line and mobile consolidation and increasing investment in new infrastructure and spectrum predicted for the next 12 months.

Leading executives from companies including Safaricom, Bharti Airtel, Orange Telkom, Eaton Towers, Helios Towers, Standard Bank, Citi and regional government representatives are meeting at the TMT Finance & Investment East Africa 2013 Conference (http://www.tmtfinance.com/eastafrica) on November 26 at the Inter Continental Nairobi to tackle the critical opportunities and challenges for the region.

"Investment opportunities in Africa are immediate, significant, diverse and potentially very lucrative," said Enda Hardiman, Managing Partner, Hardiman Telecommunications, who will be leading a session on infrastructure investment at the conference. "Consolidation is in prospect and the fixed-line vista has changed out of all recognition. Landing of new submarine cables has increased connectivity by several orders of magnitude, while deployment of fibre in access networks is now common."

The conference will also include sessions on Regional Telecom Growth Strategies, Regulating Telecoms, Mergers and Acquisitions, Datacentres and Cloud, Applications and Mobile Banking, and Mobile Infrastructure.

"This is a really critical time for the East Africa region as critical decisions about the framework for investment, particularly regulation and spectrum allocation for 3G and 4G, will have a fantastic impact on regional growth," said Chris Buist, Director, Coleago Consulting, who will be chairing the session on regulation at the conference. "There are a number of important spectrum auctions coming up across the region and operators are looking at how best to use spectrum, infrastructure sharing, new technologies and business models to meet the massive demand for data services."

Mobile tower management and investment will also be an important topic at the conference.

"Specialist tower companies are now active continent-wide – all of which have recently engaged in successful fund-raising. Selloff of towers numbering 80,000 by the five major pan-African operators is now also in prospect," said Hardiman. "The investment vista is developing rapidly. The traditional "Big Five" operators continue to have vibrant investment programmes in place. This is now being complemented by focused interest on the part of the specialist, multi-billion dollar Private Equity funds. Sovereign wealth funds and specialist investors also continue to be active."

source: www.prweb.com

vodafone Ghana loses case over 11 million debt

Ghana's International Rom has won a High Court order against Vodafone Ghana for the operator's failure to settle a debt awarded against it last May, the Daily Graphic reported. This followed an exparte motion filed by the plaintiff to get Vodafone to settle the debt of over USD 11 million and GHC 170,853.08 with accrued interest.

The High Court also ordered the managing directors of Standard Chartered Bank and Barclays Bank to appear before it on 21 November to show cause why monies standing to the credit of Vodafone should not be applied to settle the judgement debt.

On 19 August 2009, International Rom filed a lawsuit against Vodafone for the illegal termination of a contract, the payment of outstanding bills with interest at prevailing bank rates for contracts executed, as well as special and general damages for breach of contract.

This followed Vodafone's decision not to continue doing business with International Rom, after Vodafone took over Ghana Telecom, and awarded a contract to Huawei. Before the takeover, Ghana Telecom had contracted International Rom to undertake contracts including the delivery, installation, testing, commissioning, maintenance and other support services for the expansion of its business.

That deal was executed, even though from time to time the telecoms company reneged on its side of the contract to provide funds on time for the projects to be executed. This had compelled International Rom to take out commercial loans to continue with the projects.

source: www.telecompaper.com