In the main, Africa’s universal service agencies have not covered themselves in glory. Although money has been collected from operators, it has largely sat in the bank gathering interest. Even in countries such as Kenya, which have expended large amounts of energy and resources on putting in place broadband
Author: Russell Southwood
SpectraLink Wireless, with help from Facebook and Microsoft, has rolled out broadband coverage using television white spaces (TVWS) across campuses at All Nations University College and Koforidua Polytechnic in Koforidua, Ghana. The spectrum being used has been
Cameroon has offered mobile operator Viettel a year’s monopoly on the operation of the country’s first 3G network. But Viettel is no ordinary operator. It’s owned by the Vietnamese government and operated by its ministry of defence. Readers will recall I wrote about the wholesale network and landing station monopoly enjoyed
One day, everything will be data. Voice will not exist as a separate service needing different technology. The transition in developed countries has been relatively slow. However, at the international level, large amounts of calls now move through Internet protocol and multiprotocol label switching-based networks. Every year, consumer software
Jamii Telecom launched a public fibre-to-the-home network in Kenya in early 2011, but except for a few gated communities and pilots, nothing has happened in South Africa on this front. However, 2014 may be the year that changes as the lumbering
For more than a year, I have been saying to anyone that will listen that long-term evolution and video will be a game changer in Africa. The logic for arguing this case was based on the fact that YouTube was in the top five of every country measured by
A decade ago, fierce battles were fought to get a number of Africa’s state-owned telecommunications operators into private hands and to strip them of their monopoly privileges. This happened in all but two of what are now sub-Saharan Africa’s most successful economies. The real laggards are
Cameroon’s government is hanging on to its monopoly state telecommunications provider, Camtel, and the result is that the country now has some of the highest international and national wholesale fibre rates on the continent. The country refused World Bank funding because it
YooMe is a privately held Swiss company that has two African Internet service provider (ISP) businesses, one in Cameroon and the other to open soon in Côte d’Ivoire. Its CEO, Dov Bar Gera, has set up and sold ISPs in Eastern Europe, but his focus now is Africa. YooMe’s Cameroon operation has deployed WiMax
The largest of the current online platforms, both on mobile and PC, is iRoking – part of iRoko Partners, which also runs a Nollywood film platform in parallel. It received investment from US private equity fund Tiger Global and has been expanding its reach and recently opened a South African office