Wiring the African continent for the new economy came under the spotlight yesterday with representatives from both sides of the terrestrial and satellite debate presenting their case at the ITU Telecom Africa summit in Midrand.
Sindiso Ngwenya, assistant general secretary for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), said telecommunications is crucial in meeting the "development, social, political and economic goals in Africa".
Ngwenya said Comesa is promoting the establishment of a regional telecommunications network that will be built and maintained by Comtel Communications, a private company established by Comesa in September 1998. Comtel includes representation from the national telecommunications operators (NTOs) as well as private investors.
He explained that Comesa had decided that "the NTOs should spearhead the drive for interconnectivity" but that the private sector is an important part of the equation. Private investors hold 45% of Comtel Communications: "The private sector should play a role towards the success of the project."
The Comtel network spans 21 different countries from Namibia to Mauritius and from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Zimbabwe. The network will be built on a combination of optic fibre, microwave links and satellite connections and will allow for voice, data and video transmissions.
Comtel is not alone in its attempts to wire the African continent, and many complementary and occasionally competing technologies are vying for market share as business becomes aware of the potential in Africa. At the top of this list is Africa One, a private company that is pinning its business on a 32 000km undersea optic fibre ring that will circle the continent.
Pat Bagnell, president of Africa One, said the ring would provide an initial bandwidth of 60Gb, eventually up to a terabit of bandwidth, "to provide Africa with an onramp onto the information superhighway".
Bagnell added that "deregulation and privatisation had kick-started the drive towards interconnectivity". She said that the Africa One network, which would have more than 20 landing points around the continent, would be the backbone on which "Africa could build the new economy". She noted that telecommunications is expected to increase by 25% in the coming year, a significant figure in comparison with the ITU-projected 40% increase over the next 10 years.
On the other side of the connectivity debate, Gilat Network Systems aims to connect African users via satellite systems, a system that Erez Antebi, VP and GM for Asia, Africa and the Pacific Rim for Gilat, believes is affordable as well as realistic. The benefits of satellite, said Antebi, are that "it reaches everywhere, is easy to operate and offers an easy and fast roll-out," in comparison to optic fibre solutions.
He did, however, concede that bit-for-bit, satellite is a more costly solution in comparison with the high-speed optic fibre route. Unlike Bagnell, Antebi said very little had changed in African telecommunications over the past two decades and the challenges are still very much the same as they were in the past.
Karl Keppke, area manager for Hughes Network Systems, said that while many of the established rules do not apply in Africa, it was encouraging to see that "a huge amount of people understood [telecommunications] technology," and wanted to implement it. Keppke noted that the biggest of the challenges facing the telecommunications industry in Africa was that users "were not given access to information".
He added that if users were given free access to information, the market demand would drive the further implementation of telecommunications infrastructure.
On the positive side, said Keppke, "a huge amount of infrastructure is already there". No matter which system was used, "it could just piggyback on that [existing] infrastructure".
The last leg of the journey, or the 'last mile` as it is often known, is the most challenging, said Anthony Mallet, marketing manager for Wi-Lan, a wireless connectivity company. Mallet said that no matter what method was used to connect Africa to the rest of the world, the challenge is "to deliver this access to users in an affordable manner". Mallet said wireless local loop connections were easy to deploy and cost-effective.
Ngwenya said the many technologies were not mutually exclusive but it was more important to focus on the markets that they each served. The optic fibre "would take time, but the investment would be worth it".
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