Briefing

ISPAN gets new exco
The Internet Service Providers Association of Nigeria
(ISPAN), umbrella body of ISPs in Nigeria, has a new
leadership. The old team led by Sunny Imudia has been
replaced following an election that held in Lagos.
ISPAN’s new president is now Sam Adeleke of Steineng
Limited, Ibadan. Ndukwe Kalu of Adesemi Nig Ltd, is
now vice president, Olaleye Alao of Nigeria Online,
Lagos, heads finance, and Fouad Auoad of
Webonlan,Warri manages publicity. Other directors
include former president Imudia, former vice president
Lanre Ajayi of Pinet Informatics, Lagos and Sunday
Folayan of Skannet, Ibadan.

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Ghana Telecom, VRA parley on power line
Discussions are in top gear between Ghana Telecom and
the Volta River Authority (VRA) to explore ways in
which the telco could use VRA's backbone to extend
service to more subscribers. VRA, which recently
installed a 600 kilometre stretch of fibre optic
cable on its high voltage transmission line, has a
backbone that covers many Ghanaian cities.

Power line data and voice transmission is yet to catch
on in Ghana and other African countries but with VRA’s
new investment, the relatively cheap alternative in
power line communication may soon be the vogue.
However, there are doubts that the new discussions
between the telco and the electricity company would
achieve any significant results. Access to VRA's fibre
network has gone through series of negotiations in the
last three years without any headway made.

As is the case with Nigeria’s power utility company
NEPA, there is yet no appreciation of the commercial
potentials of power lines to telecom companies. In
Nigeria, not much has happened on the discussions
between Internet service companies such as
Direct-on-PC and NEPA to use NITEL’s power line
infrastructures to deliver Internet services.

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ITU approves new standard for Ethernet
The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has
approved a set of global industry standards for
Ethernet that will extend its flexibility and
simplicity to carrier networks. The standards outline
a way for Ethernet - a widely used local area network
(LAN) - to link any number of endpoints in a wide area
network (WAN), or simply as a service delivery
mechanism.
The news marks Ethernet's progress from a LAN
connectivity technology to a carrier class service
delivery technology. The ability to offer Ethernet
services means that carriers will be able to offer
considerably improved flexibility to customers through
a much simpler and lower cost interface.
It will allow users to specify exactly how much
bandwidth they want between the 10Mbit/s and 1Gbit/s
range currently offered. Further, the standards
provide reduced operation complexity and improved
scalability for carriers.

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Finalists Named in IT Competition
Eight finalists have been chosen from a field of more
than 200 nominees for the Development Gateway
Foundation’s first-ever Petersberg Prize. The 100,000
euro Prize will recognize outstanding achievement in
the use of information and communication technologies
(ICT) to improve people’s lives in developing nations.


The Prize will be awarded at the Development Gateway
Forum 2004 on June 27 to 28 in Petersberg/Bonn,
Germany. At the Forum, 80 leaders from around the
world will gather to advance the use of ICT for
development.

Speaking on the Forum’s theme, “Local Solutions for
Effective Development,” will be Rwanda President Paul
Kagame, Bulgaria Deputy Prime Minister Lydia Shouleva,
World Bank Group President James D. Wolfensohn, and
others.

Finalists for the Petersberg Prize, who come from four
world regions, have demonstrated the impact new
technologies can have on development in various fields
of endeavor.

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Vodacom wins more users
Vodacom’s cellphone tracking service Look4me is
enjoying much market favour. The service has over 20
000 people subscribing in only three months of being
launched. Look4me was launched 29 February, 2004 and
has opened a window for subscribers to keep track of
their loved ones and associates. Among others, the
service offers users opportunity to ensure that their
children are at school, keep track of company
personnel, and even track their own cellphones when
they are lost or stolen.

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Ghana Telecom is on the prowl

Ghana Telecom is on the prowl of makers of fake its
pre-paid telephone cards. Fake pre-paid cards bearing
the name of the company are being sold on the market
creating serious problems of credibility and sales for
the telco. It has asked its subscribers to buy
pre-paid cards only from registered dealers and their
agents. Street hawkers should be shunned, the company
warned. It said it has initiated measures to track
down those involved.

It advised subscribers to ensure that all pre-paid
cards they buy are covered in a rubber, have access
number of 1099, an unscratched personal identification
number or pin number, which is usually 12 digits and a
serial number.

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Nitel cuts cost of talk
Nitel has cut cost of national talk. The public telco
had some months back reduced the cost of international
talk by over 90 per cent N40. The cost of national
calls from one geo-political zone to another among the
country’s six zones is now fixed at N22.00, N20 down
from the current rate of N42, while calls within the
same geo-political zone is now N12. Local calls now
attract N6.50, an increment of about N2.20 up from the
old rate of N4.30. Nitel defends the increment as
necessary to reduce the cost of long distance calls.

Before the new rates, long-distance calls were
calculated using pulse. The longer the distance, the
faster the pulse burns out, while the pulse lasts
longer for a shorter distance. A pulse is billed
N4.30. Calls from NITEL lines to GSM is now N26 from
N30. All calls are billed per minute.

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Vodacom maintains leadership
Africa’s leading continental player Vodacom has
announced a profit of $278 million to maintain its
market leadership. The figure represents total
earnings in all the five countries it operates in on
the continent. In all, it has to 10.32 million people
talking on its network in South Africa, DR Congo,
Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania. Plans to forage into
Nigeria, which was expected to increase its earnings
in fold, have been terminated.

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NEPAD conference

How the private sector can be part of the New
Partnership for Africa Development (NEPAD), Africa’s
most significant development agenda which has provided
the continent with a framework that could promote
economic growth and poverty reduction is at the kernel
of a conference scheduled to hold in Kenya this month.


The initiative is being put together by The NEPAD
Kenya Secretariat, the Canadian International
Development Agency (CIDA) and Bertolli & Associates.
It would be the first conference in the eastern part
of the continent to appreciate that the Private
Sector, has not taken rightful ownership of the NEPAD
agenda despite being the acknowledged as the
foundation of the NEPAD process.

Organisers say the NEPAD Agenda is neither
sufficiently understood nor assimilated by the private
sector, the event is therefore geared at letting the
private sector have a good grasp of the goals and
objectives of NEPAD in order to participate actively
in shaping policies to enable governments to achieve
the targets set out in NEPAD.

Some of the key areas the conference will focus are:
Mainstreaming Gender and Youth issues into the NEPAD
Agenda; Engaging ICTs in hastening of economic,
social, and industrial development; Explore Business
Linkage opportunities as a first step for creating
Wealth and Employment; Advancing good corporate
governance as an essential ingredient for a
competitive private sector that in the long-term is
able to attract and retain the capital needed for
investment.

Others are: Prioritising human resource development
as the basis for human capital formation; Leveraging
the NEPAD Market Access initiative in creation of a
global Africa economic community; Addressing regional
peace and security interests as a precondition for
sustainable economic development; Accelerating
Regional Economic Integration as an imperative for
success in meeting development goals and becoming an
effective partner in the global economy.

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US firms accept ICT charter in principle
US firms in the information and communications
technology (ICT) sector had agreed in principle to
transfer as much as a third of their South African
businesses to black investors, the ICT Empowerment
Working Group and the American Chamber of Commerce SA
said in a joint statement yesterday. The chamber's
members include the local units of Cisco Systems,
Dell, IBM and Intel.

"All parties agreed to be bound by" rules to change
the "racial composition of enterprise ownership",
which were expected to be drawn up by June 25, the
statement said.

"There may be issues that make it difficult simply to
sell equity" such as "global policy, intellectual
property rights and corporate structure. It was agreed
that mechanisms be found to overcome [such] legitimate
impediments." The report was posted by Business Day
in Johannesburg.
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CTO, ECDL-F to develop global e-citizen program

The Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) and the European Computer Driving Licence Foundation (ECDL-F) have signed an MoU in London to jointly promote global digital literacy initiatives utilising
the ECDL-F’s e-Citizen programme.
The initiative is part of the efforts by both
organisations to develop into more partnerships to
foster the use of ICT for achieving development goals.
Both organisations offer knowledge-sharing programmes
in areas of IT and telecommunications that help to
bridge the digital divide.

 

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