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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."
Our offshore call center uses VoIP. Quality is shakey, it is difficult to hear, and calls get dropped or crossed with other service providers out of that facility. If Ghana has no other option (the 300,000 waiting list makes it sound like they don't) then I guess anything is beter than nothing, but as a professional business tool I don't think VoIP is there yet for rock solid stability and clear communciation.
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
...this will be the start of the demise of telephone networks - at least over in Africa, anyway. VoIP is getting more and more refined, along with more and more applications, such as the GPL'd Asterisk software PABX system. Most of the larger PABX systems I've seen around give the capability for VoIP links to other offices and if suitable gateways become more widely available, the move to VoIP will slowly but surely become more widespread as the larger companies that deal with the countries that have widespread VoIP penetration start to use those links to reduce the cost of making phone calls.
Can't come soon enough for my liking.This is but one more great example of how monopolies can be good for markets; Put enough pressure on a resource, and people will find alternatives.
It would be great if this could help uplift the entire continent, but I still have my doubts. Corporations bring in the money, and no corporation is going to set up shop in a country with no stable government... which seems to be a real theme on that continent.
VoIP Booming in Africa
A good highpass filter will take care of that booming which is usually caused by microphone handling. Set your rolloff at about 50Hz.
*RIMSHOT*
From what they talk about in the article, it already seems there's a call center there, which is being used to sell services in the northeastern US. Despite the claims of the article though, places like Ghana (which is really one of the better off places in Africa) still lack the resources that places like India have. Programming jobs are outsourced to India because 1) there is an education system there that produces a work force capable of doing that kind of work and 2) companies aren't afraid to invest or do business there due to political instability. Both of these are really important to get foreign investment. Take Pakistan for example. Problems with 2) have really limited opportunities there, even though it does have some of 1).
I know no west african nation has this sort of infrastructure in place at this time. However, in the future, I suppose it could happen in places with stable governments and the necessary investments.
It isn't until you see an article like this that you realize exactly how much you take for granted when you make a simple phone call. Can you imagine if the Government in your country forced you to use their own crappy telephone service? It's kind of surprising that some people complain about the breaking up of AT&T but the end result is better, cheaper phone service.
*twitch*
I am Neal, Boy of Cow, and I please to have your assistance! My father was the operator of a VoIP service until the government of Ghana have responded by shutting down the VoIP operation, seizing his equipment and cutting off service to lines it suspect of using Internet telephony. I have an OC-48 of bandwidth available for all ur spamming need, but 1st u must deposit me the IP addresses of 256 open proxies of stupid lusers with open proxies on verizon.net, attbi.com, rr.com, charter.com, or cogentco.com! PLS HELP, U HELP ME, I CAN HELP U! GOD BLESS U!!!1!
I don't really get the hype around VoIP nowdays. In the last few years my local+long distance phone bill went from $30 per month to $20 per month. And I call a lot, especially from California to my family in The Netherlands. My Internet bill on the other hand went from $9.95 (modem days) to $49.50 for fairly standard DSL (1.5M/768K). So in the time they got us VoIP, the costs have shifted enough that it becomes rather insignificant.
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.
Hey, it's worked for California...
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Book(n): Utensil used to pass time while waiting for the TV repairman
I was in Ghana a few months ago for twelve weeks.
VOIP is illegal, aside from strictly personal use as it represents potential for competition with the phone company. Ghana Telecom only wants to implement VOIP such that it may save them more money to increase their bottom line.
In fact, as I understand it, they have implemented it to a rather large degree, and have yet to pass any savings to their extremely poor customer base. Internet cafes outside of the capital, Accra, often pay somewhere in the vacinity of $1000 per month[1] simply in long distance charges, as no ISPs exist outside of the two major cities. Despite the fact that the infrastructure exists to extend leased lines and add pops in many locations throughout the country, Ghana Telecom has no interest.
USAID, in an ill-advised attempt to help has set up and fully funded telco charges for some remote internet cafes but left behind no administration, allowing the established companies to severely undercut their competition.
[1]: 8,400 Ghanaian cedis equal one US dollar. Many people outside of the two major cities (Accra, Kumasi) often make under 100,000 per month. While this is often sufficient for housing and food, twenty cents per minute long distance charges are simply outrageous.
In the old Soviet Russia, one of the first signs that there is an attempted coup in progress was that the Moscow TV stations were invaded by supporters of whomever is trying to take power. The reason was simple, if you controled the TV signals you controled the easiest means of communications with the people, and one of their few sources of news. You could tell your story uninterfered with, and block the other side's ability to tell theirs.
This is why governments want to control their phone systems, and why they don't really want it to work that well. They don't want it to be too easy for their subjects to communicate with each other, particularlly they're scared somebody's going to discuss the overthrow of those in power. The ability to freely communicate and have at least something that resembles a fair election of leaders is taken for granted in most of North America and Europe, but in other places it's not so easy.
So, by creating a telephone monopoly that makes a half-hearted effort, they've been able to say that they have telephone service for business purposes, while still limiting their people's ability to talk to each other over distance. But, the Internet snuck up on these regimes from behind, and just now they're realizing they forgot to regulate and monopolize it. VoIP isn't that good or reliable compared to well-maintained phone systems, but it's pretty good compared to intentionally mismanaged ones. Competition is usually welecomed because it forces the old monopoly to either perform to the best of its abilities or get out of the game, but this time the monopoly is just crying to the rulers and the rulers see the need to solve this problem the same way they solve any other threat to their ability to stay in power...
VoIP is an idea that looks interesting on the chalkboard but there's no reason for Americans to convert to it when they have an ultra-reliable phone network and pretty good cell phone coverage in populated areas. It's the places that don't have those things that really need VoIP.
Its amazing how open source voip is unknown. Unfortunately not many people know this even exists. What a shame !
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...
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
Now it should be easier for me to contact the Nigerian Prince who needs me to transfer his money.
[alk]
One of the worlds largest Voice of IP rollouts is almost complete at the Australian National University (ANU), with over 1500 handsets already installed. For more info see here.
The Quality of Service (QoS) issues (lag, jitter, etc) were overcome using tagged VLANs and prioritising voice over video and other general data traffic. The Gigabit eithernet backbone is in a meshed star topology, supposedly providing five 9's (99.999%) reliability. Multiple gateways connect the internal telephone system to the outside analogue world.
Looks like Africa has some competition.
Disclaimer: The tech scene in Ghana was and is probably changing at a phenomonal pace. Anything I say below could be wrong not only because it might be completely outdated, but also because it's a complicated place both politically and technologically. But to the best of my knowledge, the information below is accurate.
I was in Ghana as a volunteer last August, and I actually worked for a Ghanaian ISP that terminated VOIP calls, in addition to consulting and helping other "ISP's" set up VOIP gateways.
The legality was murky at best. Everyone gave me conflicting answers about whether it was legal or not. From the prevalence (I'll explain later), I would say that it's certainly tolerated. Few people (if any) ever got busted for doing VOIP. Part of the reason is that corruption is so rampant, you can easily dash (bribe) your way out of any trouble if you're willing to pay up.
Most "Internet Cafe's" or ISP there (most) with their own satellite were doing VOIP. The math was easy. A 512 down/384 up connection were costing about $8,000 U.S. per month (this is before fiber became available). You can't sign up any decent amount of dialup customers because most people didn't have phonelines and GT (Ghana Telecom) would take its sweet time pulling lines.
In fact, it took something like 18 months I believe for the NGO that I was volunteering for to get two lines (and I believe they had to totally work their connections). Almost all businesses and expats resorted to cellphones (the dominate player was Spacefon, I believe it's actually a scandinavian company that worked out some sort of a sweet deal that can't be revoked). But it's almost impossible to call a cellphone from a landline or vice versa (another long story, also has to do with the fact that GT is a government owned monopoly).
Internet Cafe's were a joke. They typical charge was something like 4,000 cedis to 10,000 cedis per hour. That translates to about 40 cents to just over a dollar. Nevermind whether the typical Ghanaian can afford those prices, if you have to pay out something like $8,000 per month just for the bandwidth, you simply can't make your money back.
So instead, what you do is to set up an "ISP/Internet Cafe" and you really do sign up customers and such. But what you really do is to get GT to pull a bunch of phonelines to your premises. Then you install a VOIP gateway and negotiate with western telecomms to terminate calls to those phonelines. That was the only way that they can pay for the bandwidth. Even in the U.S., voice services are much more lucrative than data services.
The "ISP" that I worked for not only terminated calls of their own, they also helped other places set them up as well (they charged a consult fee in addition to getting some sort of kick back from the bandwidth provider). I personally help with a couple of those and helped setting up a traffic shaper/bandwidth limiter.
They were actually in negotiations with GT to help them set up a prepaid card system that used VOIP. But I don't believe it ever got anywhere. The trouble with GT is that they had a monopoly and didn't have any incentive to be competitive. And because long distance voice services profits are very high, they have almost no reason why they want to change things.
So while private companies are definitely adopting VOIP, I don't believe GT is actually taking advantage of the technology. I actually sat in on a meeting with some higher-ups at GT. They didn't seem to care that it's a good technology or it would be the right thing to do. The primary interest definitely seemed to focus on how they (personally) would benefit. It's not out in the open of course. And they would never mention it. Only how there are little things that are wrong on your applications and paperwork, and how they just haven't had to chance to pass it on to the right person yet.
Either way, it was certainly flourishing. Just about every client visit where the "ISP/Internet Cafe" that had a satellite, there were VOIP gateways terminating calls.