The region has been waiting for TEAMS to light up because it has been billed as the most affordable telecommunications option, given the combination of government and private sector ownership. Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Northern Tanzania and Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have been busy finalizing their national fiber backbone to get ready for the cable’s arrival.

In west Africa, there hasn’t been much dancing or celebration even though the Africa Development Bank has invested US$240 million for a 7,000-kilometer fiber-optic cable from Portugal through Ghana to Nigeria. The investment by ADB will bolster the South Atlantic 3/ West African Submarine cable, which connects western and southern Africa countries.

The lack of celebration in West Africa may be rooted in the fact that SAT 3 has been operational since 2002. It has been underutilized, the cost of connectivity remains high and the region is still dependent on satellite.

It was therefore understandable that west Africa was not as excited as east Africa. The people in the region have been there and have had their hopes dashed.

The infrastructure investments and developments in the continent therefore raise several questions: Does the problem lie in infrastructure? Content? Policy? Access and pricing?

One major expectation is that the cost of connectivity in east Africa will decline. Businesses have been promised a drop from US$2,500 per megabyte to $400 per megabyte. But how will the cost come down when the market is dominated by the private sector?

“Most of the regional telecom infrastructure initiatives are dictated by commercial agreements between private telecom suppliers; the governments are always caught in the middle between the private sector motive of increasing shareholder value and reducing price for user[s],” said John Walubengo, acting dean of ICT at the Kenya Multimedia University.

The most complicated part is that the big telcos such as Kenya Data Networks, Access Kenya, Jamii Telecom, Safaricom and Telkom Kenya are also the major owners of TEAMS, while the rival SEACOM cable project is wholly private. No company has come up with ways to bring prices down, or said what will happen to those with business contracts for the older technology.

“Cables alone will not bring prices down. Cables plus competition will bring prices down. In instances where cables are controlled by the incumbent operators, prices will be slow to come down,” said Steve Song, telecommunications fellow at Shuttleworth Foundation.

The investors have maintained that the prices will come down, but have not talked about how open their business models would be to people who have not invested but would like to lease the infrastructure.

“The companies that bought shares in TEAMS have invested heavily and will need to recoup those costs before any significant cost savings can be realized by the consumer,” said Mbugua Njihia, CEO of Symbiotic Media, one of the companies that has invested in online products for the youth.

The case of SAT 3 has shown that for the cable to have any meaningful effect on the common person, there must be awareness and open access. The people in urban areas will go online to access e-mail, but rural folk with no prior Internet experience will have to find a relevant reason to go online.

“A lot of people (business people and the regular people) still don’t see the real value that connectivity brings, especially concerning access to information,” said Njihia. “The government and ICT board should shift focus to awareness, otherwise people will have no reason to use the digital villages.”

“No content, no motive to go online, but 80 percent of Kenyans live upcountry,” said Walubengo. “The rural community will only get online once government services (health, agriculture, education, registrations) get online.”

The debate about online content has been going on in the region for some time, and the World Bank has approved content grants that are yet to be disbursed. Content localization has also been an issue, with some people arguing that the sort of content that would add value to the rural community is different from that which would be valuable to an urban user.

“There is no use in having agricultural extension service videos and lessons in English to a group of farmers who do not understand English and would not make sense of it. Currently I don’t think there is sufficient content to serve to the more rural populations that would add value to their lives,” added Njihia.

Bandwidth may be the most popular reason why Africa lags behind as an investment destination, but there are other factors such as legislation, politics and corruption.

“Besides bandwidth, we have to show the world that Africa is the place to invest by demystifying stereotypes and improving governance structures, [and] embracing democracy and issues relating to competitiveness,” said Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication.

“Africa has to shorten the red tape, make it easy to establish a business, operate according to rule of law and deal with corruption,” said Song.

The east Africa community will face the ultimate litmus test when dealing with costs among countries and policy harmonization. For instance, one of the challenges facing SAT 3 is a discriminatory tendency among regional operators, which charge more in one country compared to others even when the infrastructure is the same.

Though Ndemo insists that the region is working on policy harmonization to ensure nondiscriminatory provision of services, the EAC is not known for its speed in debating and passing policy documents.

Whether the issues are resolved or not, it is clear that access, content, reach and availability, quality of services and ICT literacy are just as important as the bandwidth cost.

Most of the articles by Dr.Chris Hart, have had an offline life in the local dailies and on his request, where appropriate the copyright information will be reflected on the  articles.

Enjoy the compelling read that is Dr.Hart.

Katy Gabel
Nairobi

Timothy Mbugua is the CEO of Symbiotic Media Consortium. He started the company to provide a “one-stop shop” for promotions and campaigns, using a full suite of media products to engage clients. This includes print campaigns, web presence and mobile applications.

In addition to corporations, we’re also making products for the local mwananchi [citizen]. If there are five corporations we’re working for, we will have to wait three months down the line to get payment. But for mwananchi solutions, they pay before consuming the service, hence cash flow is improved for us and we have more to work with.

One of the products is Zunguka, which is pretty much a tool for collaborating. We’ve plugged in a viral aspect to it – if you refer friends you can earn redeemable points for the cinema and things like that.

Zunguka is a suite of six products: one is called TumaSMS, or “Send SMS” [short message service] in Kiswahili. There are two categories for that product: TumaSMS Mwananchi and TumaSMS Biashara. TumaSMS Mwananchi is a service to send short messages through the Internet using your own number. On TumaSMS Biashara we enable businesses to send SMSs to their client bases.

At the same time, on TumaSMS Mwananchi, you can opt to send free SMS messages by joining our advertising program. If I send you a message, for example, that says “how’s life,” Coca-Cola has bought 100,000 tags through us so that every time someone sends a message including the word “life” we attach an advertisement saying “Live on the Coke side of life.” So you can choose to send your messages either cheaply or for free through value-added text. It’s becoming pretty popular with corporations here.

A classic example of something we’ve done is a product called Esplanade for stock brokerage houses. As a client, you can access your stock portfolio account through the web, SMS and email. For example, I can send a quick message saying, “Sell my Safaricom shares at 50 bob [shillings].” But how do I know when to buy or sell? Well, I can set up my account to alert me anytime Safaricom, for example, gets to eight shillings. So I don’t have to keep track of it by constantly calling my broker.

It’s very exciting, because what’s on the market currently is access to share prices for the cost of a premium rate SMS. If you have a portfolio of 10 stocks, [it] would cost you 100 bob [about U.S. $1.60] to check them all. But if you use Zunguka, viewing those 10 stocks would cost you about 12 shillings instead.

Esplanade is pushed from the broker end. So brokers end up doing a lot of the customer education. If there’s any activity on your account, you will be alerted. This helps combat fraud on the brokerage end and increases investor confidence.

There’s another product called SMSoko where we’re simply connecting buyers and sellers via SMS and web. Not all SMEs [small and medium enterprises] can afford advertising in the newspapers. So they can join Zunguka and create their SMSoko, meaning SMS Market. It can be updated via web or SMS. You list your product, a description and a price.

If I [as a consumer] am looking for, say, black Timberland boots, I simply send an SMS and I get an SMS in return saying, for example, “We’ve found 100 traders, but because you entered via SMS we will send you the first two.” Some people have asked us, well, for those 100 traders, how do you make sure everyone gets noticed? Well, those two sellers are a random pick from the group, and all 100 traders will get a message that you are looking for black Timberland boots.

We also have a product called Kelele Mobile, which provides mobile entertainment: ringtones, wallpapers, MP3s videos – all that. It’s already a market that’s really growing, but we’re targeting East Africa by providing local content, which is very popular. Once you join Zunguka, you can share your Kelele content with friends on the network, building a full-on community.

We’re working hard at taking Zunguka international and throughout Africa. A lot of people in the Diaspora want to use our low-rate text service to contact friends and family.

We’ve designed a few other mobile services outside of Zunguka. We designed an SMS service for retrieving national examination results for secondary students. We also designed a program which sends alerts to HIV patients in western Kenya reminding them to take their antiretroviral medications. The doctor just needs to enter the patient information in a computer, and the system sends automated reminders to that patient. The patients know where that information is coming from, and they appreciate the privacy that comes with it. Another project we’re looking to do in September is creating an electronic register for political parties to prevent… electoral fraud.

Beyond that, we’re trying to work with the networks to improve what we can offer to clients. We’re really excited about location-based services. Imagine you’re walking on the street in town and you pass one of your favorite coffee joints. You then get a text on your phone telling you that you can bring in the electronic coupon for 30 percent off your cup of coffee. The possibilities are great.

Another service is called Saa Zingine, or Sometimes. It’s a dating service. We’re looking at using Zain’s One Network to do location-based services based on text. So I can just ask where the person I want to date is, and if they reveal their location to me we can meet up or chat on SMS or whatever we choose. It’s a very playful part of the portal. You can put up a profile and search others. Once you add location-based services, it takes it a notch higher. So we’ll do the Kenya launch, then the Tanzania and Uganda launches. We’ve been advised that Nigeria might be an interesting market to grow in just because of sheer numbers.

In Africa, there’s still a whole market to cover in terms of voice and SMS. But for me, 150,000 people with high-end phones provide sufficient reason to develop sophisticated applications. But I need to know that the network will allow me to take some of the 50 shillings that [a user] has made for the network by using my services. So more agreements need to come in, or we’ll be forced to continue basing everything on text, where the networks [take] more than 50 percent. The marketing is yours, the application development is yours, but the networks profit.

While these numbers may seem low and inconsequential if you know the levels of service adoption in the US and UK, but for us it is an exting start for a service that will be rolled out in 7 African countries (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, Egypt,Nigeria and Ghana) with products also developed with the diaspora in mind.

Do you zunguka?