New Country for Telecom’s Men

There’s a new country for the telecommunications sector—the Africa region. Already, Vodafone has made it as clear as day in reports that should it get a successful bid for Ghana Telecom, it would be a gateway into the ECOWAS market. A couple of weeks ago, we read that India was bidding for MTN. I suspect the reason for the bid was also to tap into the AU market by taking over the South African-based giant. France Telecom, in the latter part of last year, was reputed to also see a successful bid of GT as a way of entering the West African market.

Ghana’s ailing regulator?
These days, these types rarely mince their words, for the benefits they reap from potential subscribers are so great that there is no use engaging in mendacious statements that will divert our attention on their coming. The bottom line rules and they know most of us know. That is why our regulators should step in to protect us. So far, Ghana’s regulator – the National Communications Authority–has been irregular in providing a semblance of protection for the consumer, leaving us all to the vagaries of any Tom, Dick or Harry of a provider to come and reap tremendous dividends at the expense of quality service.

But back to this new country: we are seeing a mapping of a new landscape that no-one could have predicted a decade ago, where telephony has assumed power politics dimensions.

Think about it: that India has been bidding for a South African mobile provider is less about telephony and more about politics. India is an emerging power—and South Africa is considered a “hegemon” in the 53-member African Union on account of its economy. Back in 2004, a lot of talk was made about IBSA, or an alliance that comprised India, Brazil, and South Africa. Some of us observing the political scene wondered where Nigeria was in the whole set-up, on account of its oil, and populous country.

Enter, suddenly, the dragon of West Africa—Nigeria— with an indigenous telecommunications provider that is predicted to take the AU countries—and the world—by storm. Already that Globacom’s ad has been featuring on CNN regularly speaks volumes about the aspirations of this indigenous African mobile provider. And aspirations it will have, too!

Globacom opened in fellow ECOWAS country Benin on 5 June—much to the delight of many Beninois. The *Nigerian Tribune* newspaper reports that “the number of Okada riders adorn[ing] with the green colour of Glo were intimidating.”(Does MTN’s Y’ellow come to mind, anyone?) Clearly, without forcing a pun, Glo painted the town red, but mostly green! What was even more interesting was what brainchild of Glo Dr.Adenuga said at the gathering. In his speech, he made mention of the fact that Glo as a West African brand was happy to be in Benin Republic and that it was their belief that the black continent should benefit from the advances in technology.

Significance of Regulating
Never mind the fact that the bottom line reigns supreme. Consider this: in August 2007, I blogged on my Ghana blog that I was happy to see the Beninois phone regulator give MTN a “biting hard time”, on account of the fact that when MTN changed its name in the West African country, it failed to inform the regulators, who struck back by switching off the network, and raising the original sum of $10million to a vertiginous $620million. Take a small country like Benin fighting a Goliath like MTN. It worked. Though the stand-off died down in intensity, the authority showed it had teeth. Here in Ghana, we have seen only threats—but little action.

As I write this, the European Union commissioner for Information Society is working on a plan to reduce tariffs for European mobile subscribers. Does the African Union have the political will to ever consider an African Union Commissioner for Telecommunications that might just do the same thing? Failing that, can we bring greater pressure to bear on our sub-regional organisation’s telecomms institutions (for those that exist) to follow suit?

Stop press—Vodafone buys GT?
At the time of writing, news has just come in from the GhanaCyberGroup that Vodafone, by the close of Wednesday 2 July, will become the new part-owners of Ghana Telecom, acquiring 66.7% in the state-owned company. The divestiture-friendly government had marked GT down as one of the companies, along with the state-owned Agricultural Development Bank, to sell GT, and its mobile phone provider ONETOUCH to what it likes to call “a strategic investor.”

Though the price the government had put down was $1bn dollars, reports indicate that Vodafone made the acquisition for slightly less than that figure, at $960 million. Regulations governing the privatisation state that Ghana Telecom’s incumbent mobile provider that is known as ONETOUCH should be tripled, and fixed-line network capacity must also increase. By the end of the first quarter of this year, ONETOUCH was trailing behind MTN and Tigo respectively with a subscriber base of only 1.4 million customers.

New Cyber-group formed
There’s a new group in the virtual world that plans to take the internet by storm. Known as the Industry Consortium for Advancement on the Internet (ICASI), the non-profit group created by Cisco, IBM, Intel, Juniper and Microsoft will address what they call “multi-product security threats.” By this, they mean that they will allow vendors and customers work together to fight global IT security threats, and “resolve them in a government-neutral way.” They don’t quite elaborate what they mean by the last statement, but what we do know is that last month , a group of countries came together to create the *International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism (IMPACT)” that is funded by private businesses as well as governments based in Malaysia. The centre is to offer emergency response, training and other resources.

As to whether it will do so in Africa remains to be seen! I cannot help but wonder how quickly such groups are formed when Western interests are threatened, without resort to the global group that is the International Telecommunications Union, which surely ought to supervise even such private ventures.

ICANN opens up new top-level domains
As the internet opens up, and the emerging countries of China grow accordingly, it has become an article of the development of a pluralistic information society to open up domain names. To that end, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers(ICANN) will introduce new top-level domains (that include .com; .org; .biz), including the so-called Internationalized Domain Names that are written in Chinese and Arabic scripts.

Up until recently, ICANN has micro-managed the creation of TLDs. The new vote in late June to approve a policy proposal that will form the basis of a set of rules to create and manage new gTLDs will enable the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the .com TLD today. This will come to around 70 million. This new development means that corporations and big business could begin to run their own domains, such as france.ebay, instead of ebay.fr.

Glo Benin Sells 600,000 SIMS in Ten Days
You might have gathered by now that Globacom is preoccupying a lot of minds off-late—and not without reason. While the world was celebrating World Environment Day on 5 June, Globacom was celebrating for a different reason—it has set up shop in the ECOWAS country of Cotonou, creating what will prove to be exciting times for the small country. It is exciting also because the service provider is not a foreign-based one, but one just from next door in Nigeria. To boot, the excitement has translated into a significant number – 600,000 – being sold under two weeks of being in the country. Management of Glo Benin will announce Glo Per Second Billing; MultiMedia Messaging Service (MMS); Glo Magic Plus; mobile banking; musical ring-back tones as well as vehicle-tracking.

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