IIR London to host VOIP conferences

IIR London, renowned for its high quality telecoms conferences in the European market, has responded to the current boom in African telecoms with the first portfolio of conferences that specifically address the needs of the African market.

Designed to include case studies from African, as well as international operators, they provide the unique opportunity to evaluate the new developments in telecoms in an African context. www.iir-conferences.com/africa

Of course the biggest issue currently facing the African telecoms industry and causing great excitement in SA is VOIP and IIR`s upcoming VOIP Strategies - Africa offers a unique opportunity to cut through the hype surrounding VOIP legalisation in SA and determine how the technology is going to impact the business models of the different players in the telecoms industry.

The VOIP conference is co-located with Interconnection in Fixed and Mobile Networks - Africa, which addresses the twofold challenge of establishing interconnection agreements and setting interconnection costs, and ensuring you can monitor and bill interconnect traffic. The two events, plus a choice of interactive workshops, represent five days of focused conference sessions including over 38 presentations for international and African operators, regulators and ISPs.

2005 is set to be the year that VOIP transforms the telecoms industry worldwide and Africa, in particular, is headed for great changes. Many industry leaders argue that telecoms is about to be revolutionised as VOIP forces liberalisation strategies, enables converged voice and data networks and drives fixed and mobile convergence.

SA sees the legalisation of VOIP in February and across Africa regulators are reviewing competition regimes in their countries to prevent operators with significant market power from stifling the potential of this new market. As VOIP drives down telephony costs and stimulates the growth of networks across the continent, it is forcing operators, ISPs and large corporates alike to alter their business models and ensure they can compete in the changing telecoms landscape.

With the advent of grey market operators in Africa offering cheap international calling rates using VOIP, network operators` international voice call revenue is being threatened and traditional business models are being forced to change.

Nigeria`s Nitel estimates that before it cut its international calling rates, 90% of international calls were in the grey market.

As more and more ISPs move into the business of voice-enabled services, the market is moving from a position where the incumbent had a vertical stranglehold over large parts of the market, to one where unprepared incumbents are beginning to look vulnerable.

The VOIP Strategies - Africa conference will hear from industry leaders and network operators such as Sonatel, Gamtel and Telkom SA, which have, and will, face these challenges. They will assess the impact of VOIP on their business models, outline what strategies they are using to protect international revenues and forecast what they see as the long-term impact on international accounting rate and settlement agreements.

But it is not just the established network operator`s business models that are changing; VOIP has introduced many new players to the telecoms market with different strategies for success. The IIR conference gives you the opportunity to understand the new business models of companies such as Witel of Mauritius and Net2Phone offering VOIP services; as well as new entrant operators such as Adesemi, which is planning to launch VOIP networks. Witel will outline the legal challenges it faced in establishing a VOIP service and Net2Phone will discuss its strategies for targeting the residential market for VOIP, giving an overall picture of the new opportunities and revenue streams that VOIP technology is enabling.

Deploying VOIP in the corporate/enterprise network has become an important business focus for operators and service providers alike, as it is seen as the catalyst that will boost the growth and international competitiveness of Africa`s businesses, and represents a potentially lucrative market. Corporates want voice platforms that can deliver advanced voice and call centre applications tailored to specific operating environments and which can be integrated into existing infrastructure, and VOIP`s low cost and high level functionality makes it an ideal choice. The VOIP Strategies - Africa conference sets out to address this issue from both sides. Operators such as AT&T and France Telecom will determine the profit potential of the large business market for VOIP, and the leading vendors focused on the enterprise market, such as Mitel, Avaya and Newport Networks, will examine the technical challenges of deploying hosted VOIP services, such as call centre operations.

VOIP has, in many cases, acted as a catalyst to the liberalisation strategies of African nations and has forced regulators to consider how it should be defined and managed.

Can you apply traditional telecom regulation to VOIP?

Should you issue VOIP licences or fully liberalise the market?

These are questions that are being asked around the world and the IIR conference offers you the opportunity to hear from US regulator, the FCC, as well as from African regulatory bodies. The FCC will outline the implications of its current `soft touch` approach to VOIP regulation, focusing on the challenges of defining VOIP and the implications for its requirement to support functions such as emergency services. Also, Ernest Ndwuke from the NCC will determine how VOIP regulation should be factored into an overall liberalisation strategy.

The importance of VOIP to the African telecoms market does not simply lie in its immediate impact of market liberalisation and boost of corporate growth but also in its long-term implications for the telecoms industry worldwide. VOIP is seen as enabling voice and data convergence, driving FMC, questioning the business case for 3G and revolutionising the wholesale market. All of these issues will be addressed in the VOIP Strategies - Africa conference with Vodacom, iBasis, BTC - Global and T-Mobile sharing their long-term predictions.

Interconnect systems are becoming crucial for Africa`s telecoms markets, which are growing at a remarkable pace, especially in the area of wireless communications. However, interconnect is a challenge for many African operators and African interconnect issues are often in the news.

The challenges of interconnection faced in Africa are twofold:

* Firstly, the regulatory challenge of establishing interconnection agreements and setting interconnection costs.

* Secondly, the practical challenge of ensuring you can monitor and bill interconnect traffic.

The IIR Interconnection in Fixed and Mobile Networks - Africa conference brings together leading experts from both Europe and Africa to determine how to overcome these challenges, maximise interconnection revenue and enhance market competition. Focusing on developing strategies to manage access, authentication, revenue sharing and payments for mobile and VOIP interconnect, the speakers will evaluate the impact next-generation service offerings will have on interconnection models, as well as address the immediate issues of interconnect regulation and accurate interconnect costing and billing.

As African nations face increasing liberalisation, the regulation of interconnection and management of interconnection disputes become key to commercial success. Ernest Ndukwe, CEO of the Nigerian Communications Commission, who will speak at the IIR event, has much experience dealing with interconnection disputes and was recently forced to warn operators that 60 days after physical interconnection, an agreement would have be executed by the parties to the interconnect partner. Otherwise, the NCC would step in to enforce a new interconnect policy. These are issues that are increasingly being faced by regulators across Africa and interconnection dispute processes are being drawn up to ensure regulators can effectively encourage a competitive environment.

Part of the regulation challenge of interconnection lies in determining the need to enforce cost-based interconnection charges and, if so, which model to use. Speakers at the IIR conference in Cape Town will evaluate the success of the different costing models. Regulators POTRAZ and TCC will discuss why and how they implemented cost-based models for fixed and mobile networks and operators such as MTN, MTC Namibia, Ghanatel and Telkom SA will examine the specific challenges of costing interconnection charges for mobile and prepaid services; evaluating Sender keeps All, Revenue Sharing and Benchmarking solutions.

However, IP and VOIP traffic turns these traditional interconnect models on their head and threatens current interconnection revenues. Juniper Research highlights that the VOIP market will become the biggest revenue generator for broadband service providers by 2009, contributing to an overall value-added services market of US$47 billion. Although Africa`s limited broadband deployment may delay the implications of this, the long-term challenge to service providers will be to provision these new services as cost-effectively as possible. Flat-rate, IP-based voice tariffs will eventually replace time and distance-related tariffs. So, while looking at establishing interconnection models for TDM fixed and mobile networks in the short-term, the conference will also examine strategies to manage the long-term impact of next-generation networks on interconnection regulation and billing. Speakers such as the Director of IP Business at TeliaSonera will determine how the TDM infrastructure of least-cost routing, billing, payments and settlements will be affected by a move towards VOIP peering and VOIP clearing houses and evaluate the different means of establishing IP interconnect pricing models.

Of course, developing effective interconnect pricing models and agreements is only one half of the battle and accurate billing is crucial to ensuring interconnect revenue, both now and in the future. In the western world, interconnect billing has become the first or second source of income for most telecommunications players. For major incumbent operators, this adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of revenue each year.

In Africa, the concept of interconnect billing is still relatively new for most operators, but the opportunities to make money through this method of payment are too great to ignore. So are the losses. For example, it is estimated that First World telecommunications operators are consistently underpaying their African counterparts by up to a third of the annual US$4 billion in fees for international calls as many African operators have no means of checking the invoicing.

The Interconnection in Fixed and Mobile Networks - Africa conference brings together European and African operators such as Ghanatel, Intercellular Nigeria, Telecel Zimbabwe, MTC Namibia and Vodacom to determine best practice for interconnect billing for national and international traffic. They will be identifying and overcoming the challenges of lack of data on incoming traffic, building a billing operation and integrating interconnect billing into the overall billing system.