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VoIP Booming in Africa
securitas writes "The NY Times reports on the rapid growth of voice-over-IP telephony (VoIP) in sub-Saharan Africa and the battles it is waging with the government monopolies/ILECs. VoIP upstarts are taking market share from the government telcos, making it vastly more affordable to make a phone call since they don't charge the usual exorbitant tariffs and excessive user fees. Governments have responded by shutting down these operations, seizing equipment and cutting off service to lines they suspect of using Internet telephony. Part of the boom is related to the wait times for getting a phone line (Ghana Telecom has a backlog of 300,000 line requests), poor quality of service (50% of time you get a busy signal instead of a dial-tone) plus the willingness to trade voice quality for basic service. Foreign companies are now setting up VoIP call centers and multinationals like gold giant Newmont Mining plan to use VoIP for communications in and out of Africa. Some observers call Accra the next Bangalore, predicting a boom for the region that may make sub-Saharan Africa a major technology hub. This fits nicely with Kofi Annan's drive to use the Internet and wireless networks to change the lives of the poor."
Well, the problem could be that they haven't allocated enough bandwidth for their VoIP. With POTS, you either have a dial tone or you don't. With VoIP, you can get more dialtones but at lower quality.
I just started using Vonage's VoIP for a second line (email me for a referral/discount), and the quality is fine. I had to do some QoS tinkering on my firewall, but now the VoIP traffic has priority over other network traffic and call quality is consistent. Before the QoS tinkering, the calls would sound horribly choppy when I started a large download.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
> How ironic is it that third world nations could end up leading the way in voip adoption?
It's not ironic at all. And I think, it's also not too much related to
competition, but rather to the history of the market.
Let me explain my view: I'm german, but live in Spain since a few years.
Germans perceive Spain as "10 years" behind, when it comes to technology.
This is definately not true. There's only little technological research
and development going on in Spain (a lot less than in Germany). But on the
other hand, Spain doesn't have the same legacy!
While Germany, as a first minute adopter, employs less-than-state-of-the-art
system and keeps them running (because it was a huge financial investment),
"2nd category" countries like Spain can directly head towards the refined
essence of the technology. Until no more than 3 years ago, Germany still had
a considerable market share of analog cellular phones, while Spain was
practically 100% digital.
There are hundreds of similar examples. Because Spain doesn't invent all
the stuff, they don't hurry to get stuck with expensive first generation
prototypes. They just relax, lets stuff grow and madurate, and ignore
comments about being "behind". As soon as the technology is ready and
cheap, they employ it en gros within very little time. They overtake
the leader, and with only a fraction of the financial investment.
Of course, without 1st generation adopters there wouldn't be and 2nd
generation. So the germans aren't as stupid as it appears here. But in
my opinion, this mechanism is definately involved when African countries
use better technology than the USA or Europe...
Marc
but as a professional business tool I don't think VoIP is there yet for rock solid stability and clear communciation
As a professional business tool, as it's discussed in the article, companies like Newmont (the second largest gold producer in the world) will most likely use dedicated or leased lines (and probably VPN for security) to get to the Internet backbone, at which point VoIP's QoS has a much higher likelihood of being stable and clear.
A company like Newmont will not allow critical corporate communications to be transmitted with a technology that can't perform to the high levels that it is accustomed to. Newmont can afford the best, so this seems to be an indication that whatever VoIP solution Newmont is using is more than capable of handling the task.
Considering what I've heard about African phone service from a professor I had who lived in Africa for a number of years, I would venture to say that VoIP would be an improvement on what they have now. In many parts of Africa, the phone lines are in such bad condition (poorly spliced together, full of dirt and the like), that you're lucky if you can have a conversation through all the static. If they were able to implement Wi-Fi so that it was available to a broad enough segment of the country that people in remote villages could have internet access, VoIP could revolutionize the lives of the average African villager.
Remember, we aren't talking just about business, we are talking about empowering the little guy to have access to the outside world. The more access to means of communication, the less they can be controlled and oppressed by others.
Eagles may soar, but weasles don't get sucked into jet engines...
With the proliferation of mobile phones, the bar has been lowered for call quality, people are used to poor connections, dropped calls, etc. VoIP, even on a poor connection is often preferable to a mobile call.
I use VoIP all day (I have a nice commercial Quintum gateway at home, and at each of our offices). I will get calls from co-workers on my cell, and if I get frustrated (often) I will call them back over VoIP with MUCH better performance. All of our inter-office voice traffic is VoIP.
Your problem with your call center sounds like one of poor IP connectivity, not a problem with VoIP itself. With decent IP connectivity, VoIP call quality, even with compressed codecs, ranges from near-toll quality to far better than your average cell phone call.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
Along with the 11-meter antenna, all the equipment was housed in a small building full of racks and UPS, and a generator outside. The generator (and fuel storage, fuel delivery services, etc.) had to be rated to be able to deliver hours of power, on a routine basis (daily), because that's how often the power would fail.
Now, that was just the gateway to allow the public phone network to interface to the rest of the world. I also built a pan-African voice and data satellite network for a corporate customer (hint: Exxploit) that simply wanted to bypass all the local telco nonsense and just have a system (albeit and expensive one) that would work regardless. Calls went from city to city (e.g. Libreville to Accra) over the private satellite network and went to the rest of the world via a direct hop to London.
A critical factor in all of this is the ability to get the equipment LEGAL in the country (look up "homologation") -- it's really just an elaborate national shakedown system (as is the european CE mark). The key for us getting the contract was that we had our foot in the door in most of the countries already and could get the equipment in and on the air by riding our existing paperwork.
Anyway, all this is to illustrate that the tariff issue is of critical importance, and solving the technical issues are really secondary -- you've got to find a way to make it legal or the local jackboots will shut you down.
- Chris
P.S. And to illustrate a sadder side of the business, the guy who built the Accra gateway with me, Peter Kennedy, later took a contract job building telecom infrastructure in Chechnya, was taken hostage by Chechen rebels for ransom, and was found decapitated a few weeks later. Not a peep out of the U.S. State Department. Peter was a really nice guy.
One simple rule for its versus it's
What's immediately overlooked here is that in sub-saharan countries, it's not always possible to accurately calculate and collect owed taxes based on income. They don't exactly have W-2s in Africa.
A man from Iran has explained to me once that the wealthy made many, many more calls as a child, especially long distance, including international calls. Using telephone tariffs has proved an extremely effective progressive tax within developing countries.
We, of course, could apply this argument with the Internet, by arguing that there are few ISPs in these sub-saharan countries and are usually tightly regulated, so the government has ample opportunity for keeping a grasp on revenue for taxation purposes.
Finally, we shouldn't forget that the Internet was originally a government sponsored project, at least in the United States, and in many ways -- via NASA and the DOD -- continues to be.
Don't call BS and accuse me of not caring. Do I look like a politician? No. I have no control over where the money goes in this world. I am one of those people that genuinely cares...but am NOT in a position to do anything about it. If someone does a job for $.50 per hour that was done for $18 per hour here...THAT is exploitation. Maybe the standard of living is lower...but to pay someone that little for doing what ends up being high-value work is exploitation.