Mismanagement and Corruption Hinder ICT in Uganda

Mismanagement and Corruption Hinder ICT in Uganda…

Uganda lays wrong ICT cable – Experts |New Vision | April 4, 2010

UGANDA is laying the wrong fibre optic cable for the national backbone infrastructure, local and international experts have said.

Uganda is using the G652 type whereas it should be using G655 for the kind of data Uganda will need to transmit.

But despite instructions from the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Parliament to halt the second phase until the technical issues have been resolved, the Chinese company, Huawei Technologies, has refused to stop.

Every day the works continue, the company is using up more of the $106m (sh212b) for what experts say will prove to be a ‘white elephant’.

The National Transmission Backbone Infrastructure and related e-Government Infrastructure is a project funded by a concessional loan from the export/import bank (EXIM) of China.

Uganda has to pay back the loan over a period of 20 years.
The Chinese government sourced and recommended Huawei Technologies to carry out the implementation.

There was no tender and according to inside sources, no proper needs assessment study prior to implementation.
One source said a project document from Malawi was simply copied and the word ‘Malawi’ changed into ‘Uganda’.

The project involves building a 2,100 km fibre optic cable network linking 20 major towns, making Internet accessible and affordable to the majority of Ugandans and enabling e-Government.
Ultimately, it is meant to be linked to the submarine cables that have recently arrived at the East African coast and provide faster and cheaper Internet access to Uganda.
The backbone infrastructure is very instrumental for Uganda’s development.
It will determine whether the country will catch the ICT train or miss it.

The UN has established that there is a direct link between the spread of Internet and economic growth. The International Telecommunication Union found that every 1% increase in Internet penetration results into a $593 increment to GDP per capita.
Yet, contrary to neighbouring Rwanda, the country might miss the train due to an inadequate network and outdated technology that experts predict will constantly break down.

Wrong cable type
Questions about the type of cable were raised as far back as June 2009. In a brief to the ICT minister, the Project Implementation Unit recommended a shift from G652 to G655.

It argued that the cable used has Four Wavelength Mixing, a “phenomenon that introduces signal distortion that is extremely difficult to overcome”.
It also said the cable has very high levels of chromatic dispersion, “a phenomenon that introduces errors during signal transmission”.

More concerns about the type of cable were raised in a document drafted in September by the parliamentary committee on ICT.
The committee found that the bandwidth per fibre was too small. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic the fibre can carry simultaneously.
The G655 has a capacity of transmitting 40 gegabites per second whereas the current one can only transmit 2.5Gb, upgradable to 10Gb.

Experts say this is insufficient for Uganda’s current needs. It cannot provide for future growth bearing in mind that other countries, like Rwanda, may tap on the same infrastructure.

“The G652 cable does not have enough provision for future upgrade path for higher data rates, multiple channels and longer distances,” said the ICT committee.
One expert explained that it will be like driving traffic from a 10-lane road converging onto a one-lane road; leading to huge traffic jams.

“Projects like e-health or e-education using video-links may become difficult if not impossible to run across the country because they require huge bandwidth,” the expert said.
Makerere University had planned to set up five up-country centres allowing students to attend classes at the main campus through a video-link. Such projects, the expert said, may be excluded with this type of cable as data and video traffic grows across the country.

Dispersion distance
The committee also established that the reachable dispersion distance for the current cable is less than half of the G655.
This is the distance from where the optical signal, or light, dissipates or phases out.

According to the ICT committee, the reachable distance of the G652 is 80km, whereas the signal for the G655 can reach over 210km.

When the signal phases out, it needs to be regenerated through ‘boosters’, which are expensive to build and maintain.
It will also greatly contribute to ‘down time’ of the infrastructure, meaning the system will shut down.

Cores
Another concern raised is the number of cores of fibre that has been installed.
The cable being laid is only a 24 core fibre whereas experts recommend 96 cores as a minimum to ensure that future growth in data and video usage is not interrupted.

The number of cores determines the number of separate channels. Security sensitive information, for example, is preferably transmitted through a separate channel.
“The advantage of more cores is that they can be distributed over a much wider area,” an international ICT expert told The New Vision.
“In some instances, the cores not used by the Government could be leased to third party providers, making it a profitable business.”
Uganda will need this additional income to pay off the Chinese loan.

Price
Apart from the type of cable, experts have also raised questions about the price.
Rwanda spent $38m to cover a distance of 2,300km to connect 35 sites.
Uganda, on the other hand, will spend $61.6m to cover 2,100km.

That means that Uganda will spend about $30,000 per kilometre on the project, whereas Rwanda will spend $16,000 per kilometre.
This is despite the fact that Rwanda is using the G655 type, the one recommended by experts, which is slightly more expensive.

MPs and officials of the National Information Technology Authority (NITA) are particularly worried that the Chinese company is continuing the works without any supervision.

The Auditor General in his December report already criticised the lack of proper supervision during the first phase.

He noted that the Project Implementation Unit was only set up six months after the works had started.
“By this time, substantial amount of work on the contract had been undertaken,” the report says.

“Capacity was still lacking in terms of numbers and expertise, with the unit manned by only six technical staff, out of which only four were field-based.”
NITA and the ICT committee have demanded the immediate suspension of the works pending an entire review of the project based on a proper needs assessment study.

“A full technical audit is urgently required to save whatever is left of the $106m, and immediate steps need to be taken to rectify the situation,” said a source.

“Otherwise potentially fatal technical problems are facing both the National Backbone Infrastructure and e-Government.”

Missing the ICT train, NITA says, will be catastrophic for the future of Uganda.
“Wasting $106m is bad enough. But the loss of the money is nothing compared to the long-term consequences of missing the ICT revolution.”

Phone firms shift focus to post growth

Phone firms shift focus to post growth | Daily Nation | Jevans Nyabiage

Mobile phones are slowly starting to replace personal computers in sub-Saharan Africa, where a PC is still quite expensive.

Mobile phone service operators are betting on data to grow their revenues as income from voice nears saturation.

Telecom research firm, Frost & Sullivan says data services is the next kid on the block for mobile phone firms if they have to register continued growth.

This, the firm says, is because mobile phones are no longer seen as a tool for basic phone calls and text messages only.

The just-released annual results for operator MTN confirm the growing role of data services for African mobile firms.

The group reported that approximately 15 per cent of its revenue last year came from data.

Frost & Sullivan’s ICT analyst Silvia Venter says this is an indication that the days of data consisting only of basic SMSs and accounting for less than 10 per cent of an operator’s revenue are gone.

She says mobile phones are slowly starting to replace personal computers in sub-Saharan Africa, where a PC is still quite expensive.

In Kenya, Safaricom recently said it is shifting its over-reliance on voice which is reaching saturation with new frontiers like data and value added services, which it bets to grow its future revenues.

Other operators

According to chief commercial officer Peter Arina, over the past three years the firm has invested about Sh7.5 billion in a bid to establish a cross-section of technologies aimed at positioning the firm as a serious data player.

Although there are no public figures on the uptake of data for the other operators, their aggressive marketing for the same points to the ongoing battle.

Telkom Kenya bets on its fixed line to increase data solutions while Zain Kenya recently signed agreements with 45 telecoms operators around the globe to allow it expand international roaming coverage for data services.

Ugandan Google Maps Launched Featuring Entebbe and Kampala

Kato Mivule | March 1st 2010

An interesting development as Ugandan maps become digitized. Google is surely becoming a force in the Information Technology Revolution in Africa…

Uganda: Google Launches Maps | AllAfrica| Sylvia Nankya |24 February 2010
Kampala — Detailed maps of Kampala and Entebbe are now accessible on Google Maps through any web browser. The maps can also be accessed on data enabled mobile handsets. They come with both a satellite and a terrain view of the cities. Kenya and South Africa were the first beneficiaries of the Project which has now extended to 29 cities across Africa. “Google Maps isn’t just a searchable digitised maps helping you to find a local place, service or product – it is about making information with a geographical dimension available to everyone” Rachel Payne Country Manager Google Uganda said recently. Google believes that more accurate local information can greatly improve the breadth of information available about a given area and in turn can help efforts to bolster tourism and business investment. Businesses can also benefit

Google Map of Entebbe

from the Street View technology by embedding Google maps directly into their site for free, helping them to promote a chain of hotels or raise awareness about a local library or restaurant, Payne said. She added that the service will give tourists a taste of the variety that Uganda offers, and a chance to research their holidays in advance. The map data includes a substantial amount of user generated content provided via Google Map Maker. The Map Maker allows users to locate, draw, label and provide attributes for local map features, such as roads, parks, or rivers, turning local users into “citizen cartographers.” Payne allays fears that the maps could pose a security threat to the cities. “The Information we are using on Google is approved and available to every citizen, she said.

Is Bharti Airtel’s Zain Deal Good For Africa? Maybe Not

Kato Mivule | February 16, 2010

Bharti is positioned to take over Zain assets in Africa and that includes operations in Uganda. However, Bharti failed at gaining access to Africa’s Telecom Boom by taking over MTN assets in Africa. Bharti then is reported to have borrowed money to secure the Zain assets in Africa. The translation of this is might mean restructuring and more of a profit driven ideology that might sacrifice employees and African indigenous talent in the short term. Yet still Bharti Airtel will bring with it innovation in the area of mobile applications and probably move Africa towards fully utilizing “Africa’s new PC”, as one blogger refereed to the mobile phone phenomenon in Africa.

Bharti AirTel Logo

Zain Sees $5 Billion Profit From Africa Unit Sale | Businessweek
Feb. 16 (Bloomberg) — Zain, Kuwait’s biggest phone company, said it expects a return of as much as $5 billion from selling most of its African operations to Bharti Airtel Ltd. in a deal that would almost halve its assets…Bharti, South Asia’s biggest mobile-phone company, and Zain said yesterday they entered into exclusive talks under which the Indian company would buy the African assets for $10.7 billion. Bharti will pay $10 billion when the deal is completed and the rest a year later, Zain said in a statement on the Kuwait Stock Exchange Web site today. The transaction excludes Zain’s operations in Sudan and Morocco….Bharti is seeking Zain’s African business for access to an estimated 42 million customers across 15 African countries from Nigeria to Uganda. Bharti’s third attempt to enter Africa highlights billionaire Chairman Sunil Mittal’s ambitions to expand overseas as competition intensifies at home, where call rates have fallen to less than a penny a minute. Mittal has tried to gain access to other fast-growing markets, including a second failed attempt last year to buy South Africa’s MTN Group Ltd. for about $23 billion.

Zain Logo

Bharti eyes debt financing for Zain Africa buy – sources | Money Control
Bharti Airtel, which has offered USD 10.7 billion for Kuwaiti telecom Zain’s African assets, is likely to finance the majority of the deal’s purchase price with foreign currency loans, three people familiar with the matter said…Zain, which is selling its telecoms operations in 15 African countries to Bharti, said on Tuesday the deal included USD10 billion to be paid at completion and the remaining USD 700 million by the end of the year…Separately, the NDTV Profit television channel said Bharti was considering a rights issue to help fund the deal. However, at the time of its ultimately thwarted merger talks with South Africa’s MTN Group last year, Bharti had said there was no plan for any rights issue. A Bharti Airtel spokesman declined to comment on Tuesday on how the firm would fund the deal. Standard Chartered and Barclays are advising Bharti Airtel on the merger and its funding, one of the sources told Reuters.

Broadband brings new hope to Africa’s poor, elderly- ITU

The East African|February 8 2010

Effective delivery of essential services in Africa lies with the deployment of broadband networks, according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), a United Nations agency for information and communication technology.

During the recently concluded African Union Summit held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia, the agency appealed to African countries to focus on broadband networks as the transformational technology that will aid in the efficient use of energy, management of healthcare in poor, ageing and isolated population as well as the delivery of the best education to future generations.

ITU secretary general Hamadoun Toure said broadband is the most powerful tool to drive global social and economic development as well as accelerate the realisation of the UN Millennium Development Goals.

He, however, noted that the cost of broadband must be made affordable and accessible in order to benefit Africa.

“While the technology exists, the benefits are yet to be realised in most countries. This is because broadband networks can never deliver on their full potential until they provide each citizen with fast, affordable access,” said Dr Toure.

The ITU boss told the AU meeting, whose theme was “Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Africa: Prospects and Challenges for Development,” that broadband networks must be regarded as basic national infrastructure, just like transport, energy and water networks.

Dr Toure added that Africa has to “act as one in its approach to formulating its Vision 2020,” during this decade — whose theme is premised on the idea of an integrated Africa through the utilisation of ICT.

Vision 2020 will address various strategies including common codes and spectrum management, harmonisation of policy and regulatory frameworks and low cost continental roaming.

It will also address affordable rural access and direct inter-continental links through fibre optics and satellite.

“In general, it will tackle key global issues related to ICT such as cyber security, cyber peace and emergency communications especially during natural disasters, content development through e-health, e-commerce, e-government, e-education and e-agriculture,” he said.

In order to encourage investment in the continent’s ICT sector, the ITU boss said there is “real opportunity to use all the potential of public-private partnerships (PPPs).”

The driver to new investments in the ICT sector, he added, would be a policy and regulatory framework conducive to competition and growth, as well as capacity building and training on policy issues in the continent.

On the levels of mobile tele-density (the number of telephone lines per 100 people), Toure said at the start of last year, the levels across Africa were at 38 per cent of the population but had improved to 42 per cent.

He, however, said the Internet user base, which by 2008 had grown to 48 per cent, was still low with only 8 per cent of the continent’s 840 million people having access.

Jean Ping, chairperson of the AU Commission highlighted different projects the body had launched in various fields including ICT, infrastructure, energy, agriculture and education.

“The Commission has also made progress in driving the science, technology and information society. An example is the tele-medicine facility opened at the AU clinic during the Summit through partnership with the Indian government,” said Ping.

The tele-medicine facility, financed by the Indian government, is part of the Pan African e-Network project, which is meant to enhance Africa’s capacity by imparting quality education to students and providing tele-medicine services, tele-education and video-conferencing as well as voice services for heads of state.