Duh! Everyone agrees, but…
" Africa has 816 million people (2001):
" 21 million fixed lines (over 100+ years)
" N. Africa: 11.4 million
" South Africa: 5 million
" Rest: 4.6 million
" I.e., 10% of world population (626m), but 0.2% of lines
" 24 million mobile subscribers (over ~5 years)
Africa needs:
" Low-cost, highly-reliable communications networks to enable business,
government, civil society, family life, education
" IT services require communications infrastructures, regulation that fosters, rather than blocks, IP networks
" The poorer you are, the more you need affordable, reliable, resilient information & communications technology (i.e., IP)
" If Internet protocol technology today has the ability to give every African (rural & urban) access to low-cost,
high-reliability, high-quality communications services, African governments had better have some really
good reasons for slowing or blocking it.
" We're going to look at how and why African governments are typically regulating IT,
and consider how they might do it better, to serve the interests of their people better.
" "African governments" = a composite of what most (not all) of the larger African governments are doing.
Don't be fooled by appearances:
the Internet is not just a new network that competes with the telephone system:
Internet represents a new and different method of communications (& way of thinking)
" Internet = packet-switched, decentralized, distributed, ad hoc, flexible, end-to-end, intelligence at the edge, open standards
" Telephone = circuit-switched, centralized, top-down, hierarchical, controlled, inflexible, intelligence at the core, proprietary standards
" The future of all communications is the Internet Protocol
" That's the reality; it's already happening
" Even telecom carriers are moving to IP
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African governments must either embrace this coming reality - i.e., embrace IP - or
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condemn their countries to fall further and further behind the developed world
" In the Information Age, there will be little economic development without affordable, reliable communications
" Services (voice, data, TV, etc.) will no longer depend on specific facilities (copper, radio, coax, satellite)
" All services will be available over all communications facilities
" So: Regulators should allow all infrastructures to compete in an open market to offer the cheapest, highest-quality services
A vision of the future:
Any (licensed) communications provider should be allowed to offer any communications service,
using any available facilities, and should be allowed to use or avoid the incumbent telecom's network as it thinks best.
" There is no technical reason to force a particular service onto a particular kind of infrastructure
Q: Is there a good economic or political reason?
" Government has an interest in maximizing the value of state-owned telco: to get the most money from privatization
" Government owns telco and is responsible for setting IT sector rules and for enforcement
" Can benefit telco at the expense of its competitors
" Terms of network access; Interconnection Pricing; Spectrum; ISP & service licenses; Limits on international gateways
" Regulator is not independent; lacks experience & expertise in IT regulation
" May be vulnerable to pressure from (privatized) telecom
Example: War on VOIP services
" VOIP is not another form of telephony
" Traditional telephone service is a network-level function
" VOIP is an Internet application, just like any other
" To the Internet, packets are packets
" VOIP follows users anywhere, over any network
Commercial VoIP services allow a customer to:
" Use a VoIP box to connect his/her ordinary telephone into any broadband Internet connection (keeping the same phone number)
" Make very inexpensive national & international long distance ($0.05/min to China, for example)
" Take the VoIP box anywhere in the world (except where illegal!), plug it in to a decent Internet connection,
and make and receive calls as though at home
" Retrieve voicemail via the web
" Control features like call forwarding, call waiting, voicemail from anywhere, via the web
" Also available: Full business VoIP systems; VoIP over WiFi; computer-to-computer VoIP ; computer-to-phone VoIP
Why should Africans alone - of all people - be deprived of the least expensive, most reliable communications platform in the world?
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