Ekuwem takes baton to lead ATCON

Barely three months after he left office as president of Nigeria Internet Group (NIG), Dr Emmanuel Ekuwem has emerged as the new man for the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (ATCON), the umbrella body of telecom companies in Nigeria consisting of more than 80 registered organisations.

Ekuwem defeated CEO of Lagos based ISP Linkserve, Chima Onyekwere, to emerge president of ATCON after a keenly contested election that recorded a tie of 18/18 for the two contestant in the first round.

A second round voting brought the score to 19/16 in favour of Ekuwem to close the vacuum left open since the death of Charles Joseph who presided over ATCON until his controversial death last year.

Questions hang over Telenor in Ghana Telecom 

The fate of Norwegian Telenor ASA is about to be announced by the government of Ghana as it is being handed an appraisal of Telenor’s three- year Stewardship.

Nigeria sets March 2007 for satellite launch

Nigeria is looking at launching its communication satellite
(NIGCOMSAT-1) by March 30th though December 2006 was earlier inked as launch date. But authorities said the date does not indicate signs of hitch but rather underlines the level of work on the $40 million satellite to a stage where a more realistic date could be made.

"All the time we need is 12 months. If you want me to be emphatic, we are looking at March 30th 2007 launch date for NIGCOMSAT-1. We are going to have a meeting by middle of this month or third week of this month [March 2006] to look at the schedule. We will review the entire
project schedule critically and see if we can afford to launch by December 2006," said Head of the NIGCOMSAT-1 Project Ahmed Rufai to IT Edge in Lagos.

Nigeria discusses future under unified licence 

With N26 million (about $200, 000) as the asking price for a unified licence in Nigeria, some private telecom operators (PTOs) are considering building ‘mutual’ alliances as the initial step to merging as the terrain becomes more competitive and costly to play on.

Some PTOs had business talks last week in Lagos over how to survive the new wave of competition expected to be unleashed in the 120 million market where less than 12% own a phone.

“We have been talking long before NCC [Nigeria Communications Commission] gave notice of its intention to offer unified licence because some of us know it would eventually happen,” the CEO of one PTO told IT Edge in Lagos.

Nigeria’s telecom sector is dominated by three GSM operators: MTN, Vmobile, and Globacom with a motley number of PTOs which usually refer to small size indepenedent operators with offering landline or fixed wireless services with no national roaming.

Unlike the PTOs, GSM operators are allowed to roam in addition to operating their own international gateway services. Now, with unified licence, network owners may offer all services they desire to using designated spectrum and they may also roam nationally.

In a country of over 975, 000 square kilometers, about four times the size of the United Kingdom, and a population listed the world’s big 10, operators with unified licences have a bounty to make.

But the snag is to that to get the juice flowing, operators would have to cough out a lot of moneys and ready to stake higher fund in rollout.

For PTOs, it is a problem. “We don’t have that kind of money,” one PTO said in Lagos,” adding “and I doubt if any PTO has.”

But not all operators are pessimistic. Both Reltel and Multilinks think they could still play in the field and take on big players like MTN and Globacom which already enjoy competitive advantage.

But they think a merger among PTOs would give them a better chance of overcoming their challnges and “getting a our dues in the market,” as an official of MTS First Wireless put it in Lagos.

Telephone and data service provider, 21st Century Technologies, has started the business of outsourcing, the first of its kind in the country.
Want a licence to do all? You need N260 million to rollout-unified services in Nigeria’s already fiery telecom market with the release in January by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) of the unified licence rules.
Under the regulator’s “FWA and PNL licensees (Fixed Telephony and LEO) will be allowed to provide mobile services subject to the frequency assignment and geographical limitations in the original license; Digital Mobile licensees will be allowed to provide fixed and data services; All Unified Licensees will be able to provide ISP, VAS and Payphone services; International Gateway for own use and third party will be allowed.”

The Unified licence scheme is broken into structures including national and regional roaming services. But analysts generally admit that the meat in the unified licence is the ability to roam nationally and have ruled out chances that regional roaming as envisaged under the scheme would be commercially rewarding.
Unified Licence Fees
National Mobility N260m
Regional Mobility (Based on the tier structure in table below)
 TIER   LICENCE FEE (NAIRA)

  1.     33,000,000
  2.     20,000,000
  3.     16,000,000
  4.     14,000,000
  5.       9,000,000

 

NITDA, Interstellar to run IXP  

WNigeria’s apex IT body the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) is considering working with a privately licensed telecom company Interstellar to operate an Internet Exchange Point (IXP).

Virtually all internet traffic including those originating and terminating from local terminals are routed from external servers abroad eating up costly bandwidth and telling on the yearly budget on for bandwidth in Nigeria. Africa countries including Nigeria pay about $600 million yearly to foreign satellite companies for bandwidth.

The deal between NITDA and Lagos based Interstellar, it sails through, could slice the budget by more than a quarter.

Talks have reached an advanced stage between both organisations (IT Edge learnt) as they discussed how the business model would be fashioned to allow for local internet traffic to stay local.

NITDA is currently managing the country’s top-level domain name (.ng) pending when an all-stakeholders NGO takes over the management.

Interstellar has licence to offer satellite-based services among others. Its plans to offer unified telephony services more than 18 months ago ran into a ditch as the worried regulator vacillated over whether the service would not caused furore in the industry.

The Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) has announced formal plans to allow for unified services from next month.

Both NITDA and Interstellar think a private/public partnership (PPP) would offer a competitive advantage in the market now that the regulator was poised to allow unified services to be offered.

The two parties are not talking about the deal. But IT Edge learnt that the NITDA is excited about it and “hopes it would come to a fruitful outcome,” as one top official put it at the weekend.

First Atlantic Bank proves SMS banking gaining grounds

SMS Banking may not be making the headlines but it is certainly growing and fast too as one of Nigeria’s pioneer of Internet banking First Atlantic Bank has found out.
The bank now has about 270, 000 SMS bank account holders since it first launched the service four years ago.
Its flagship SMS banking service ‘Flash me cash’ have grown in popularity though there is still plenty room to get more people using it of the over 10 million mobile phone subscribers said Group Head of Technology Deji Oguntonade and Head of Electronic Product Marketing Group (EPMG) Ure Okezie, In an exclusive interview with IT Edge in Lagos.
Besides of the 270, 000 SMS bank account owners, only 10% or 27, 000 are considered active. But the volume of transaction is on the double positive side. SMS banking transaction averages about N600 million in a month to underscore the level of confidence those who click on their phones to do banking transactions have in their platform.
When First Atlantic first introduced SMS banking, less than 40 phone users were willing to use their phones to make financial transactions on any day. Over time, the acceptance level rose record to 300 per day. Lat year, it increased to 1000 users per day and this year, an average of 3000 people click their mobile phones to do banking business Oguntoinade and Okezie told IT Edge.

“We have seen a huge transaction in value and volume of what we have done and people are more comfortable with the product. We now have ‘Flash me cash’ club like a marketing network that helps spread out the news on the merits of the product,” said Oguntonade.
First Atlantic Bank which is teaming up with other banks to form the new Astra Bank under the Central Bank of Nigeria regulation that banks increased that liquidity base to N25 billion (about $250) said its Internet banking has offered more exciting results.