NIGERIA: GLO, AIRTEL, ETISALAT CRIPPLE NITDA WITH BILLIONS OF NAIRA DEBT

Globacom, Etisalat and Airtel owe the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) billions of naira via default in the payment of mandatory levies from annual profits, Director-General, Dr Isa Ibrahim Pantami, has lamented.

He spoke during a session with the ad-hoc committee investigating the activities of telecoms operators and vendors, adding that the debt was part of the National Information Technology Development Fund (NITDEV).

According to the Act establishing NITDA, telcos operating in the country shall pay one per cent of their annual profits as levy for NITDEV.

Pantami told the lawmakers that the only operator that has been consistent in paying the levy is MTN.

According to him, MTN has paid a total of N19 billion since the inception of the fund in 2007, while Globacom paid N1.3 billion only for 2011, 2012 and 2015; Airtel paid N677.7 million for 2007, 2008 and 2015 while declaring losses in other years, However, Etisalat, which began operations in the country in 2008 has consistently claimed losses and refused to pay any anything.

This revelation has prompted the Hon. Ahmed Abu- headed committee to resolve on ensuring the recovery of the said outstanding from the defaulting operators.

However the committee said it would recover all the money being owed by the telcos.

Abu said NITDA data base failed to capture companies such as Ericsson, Alcatel, Siemens and others which are supposed to pay.

Asked if the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) was up and doing in collecting the amount due to NITDA, Pantami said: “Since I came on board, I have been battling with the companies on remittance. Our Act states clearly in Section 16 that FIRS should collect and remit the amount for us through our account at the CBN.

“I also wrote a letter to some of the companies. We wrote to Microsoft, Facebook, Cisco and Oracle. We believe they have been making profits in Nigeria, but they never remitted. Some of them responded to our letters, but others didn’t.

“MTN, as a leading GSM company, has been consistently paying. It contributed N19 billion so far. In 2016, MTN recorded a loss, so they couldn’t pay,” he said.

The lawmakers opined that some service providers may have escaped the payment net for the levy and expressed doubt on if the service providers were actually recording losses as claimed.

Pantami said NITDA was helpless in the absence of relevant information from the FIRS.

“We only rely on what the companies send to us because we can’t get anything from FIRS. I don’t have any record to verify whether MTN is remitting what it’s supposed to,” he lamented.

Source: BizTech Africa

SOMALIA: DALKOM SOMALIA, INTELSAT SA LINK UP ON SATELLITE SERVICES

Dalkom Somalia, a Somalia-based telecommunications services provider established in 2003, has signed a multi-year agreement with Intelsat SA for broadband enterprise and direct-to-home services in East and Central Africa.

According to the deal, Dalkom will incorporate Ku-band satellite services provided by Intelsat 17 to extend services currently delivered by its fibre network.

Intelsat 17 is part of Intelsat’s video neighbourhood in the Indian Ocean.

A statement from Intelsat SA says the extended services include expanding broadband enterprise networks into South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as the Middle East.

Dalkom will also add direct-to-home services to its portfolio in Somalia.

Mohamed Jama, CEO of Dalkom, is quoted as saying, “We have a strong terrestrial fibre network, but our opportunities to expand into new regions and capitalise on new opportunities were limited. By adding Intelsat’s satellite expertise to our network, we can expand our enterprise services into regions where terrestrial technology cannot provide services.”

“Intelsat 17 will also allow us to capitalise on Intelsat’s media distribution knowledge to introduce DTH services for customers,” he said.

“Dalkom has offered satellite services in the past, but the versatility of the Intelsat 17 satellite convinced them that moving to Intelsat was the best option for meeting its expansion goals,” said Brian Jakins, Intelsat’s Vice President, Africa.

“The ability to deliver broadband enterprise and DTH services via the same platform provides easy access to new markets and customers without worrying about network reach and reliability. This allows Dalkom to focus on growing its business. Our satellite platform will also complement its fibre services by serving as an instantly available back-up to protect against any service interruptions.

This announcement comes soon after Intelsat confirmed the opening of a new sales office in Nairobi, Kenya, to be managed by Lawrence Mungai.

The company believes that East Africa will benefit extensively from the introduction of broadband connectivity solutions entering the market – specifically that which addresses complex communications challenges facing wireless infrastructure, banking and enterprise networks.

Source: IT Web Africa

ANGOLA AIMS TO BE A CENTRAL TECH FORCE IN AFRICA

Angola has ambitions to emerge as a competitive technology force and internet hub in Africa. Telecommunications professionals focused on the market, like Hans Geldenhuys, Managing Sales Director at Intelsat Africa, say the Southern African country is undergoing a technology transformation underpinned by an increasing need for connectivity and innovations across key sectors.

Geldenhuys says according to the latest data sourced from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), Angola’s ICT and telecoms sector has recorded an annual growth rate of 55% over the past 10 years and has 14 million consumers.

He says that key verticals, including energy, banking and government, are either diversifying their networks or expanding geographically and this is fuelling the high demand for broadband, especially mobile.

Reaching rural areas with connectivity and routing the benefit to sectors like agriculture, education and healthcare remain priorities for the country’s government, says the Intelsat Africa executive.

Its fixed telecommunications market is also an area where improving network quality and coverage could have a great impact on the local economy.

However, as Geldenhuys points out, the ITU also states that access to the internet remains low and Angola’s penetration rate was 12.4% in 2015.

The focus going forward will be on infrastructure that can connect last-mile deployments to remote businesses and residences.

Source: IT Web Africa

MOZAMBIQUE: TDM AND MCEL MERGER MOVING AHEAD

The government of Mozambique is pushing ahead with its plan to merge state-backed fixed line operator Telecomunicacoes de Mocambique (TDM) and its mobile subsidiary mCel. A director’s committee has been appointed to oversee the process, which is aimed at making the firms more efficient and allowing for an increasingly converged portfolio of fixed and mobile services. Both companies are thought to be operating at a loss, and there has been some speculation that the merger of TDM and mCel could be the precursor to further privatisation by the government in the hope of bringing in an outside investor to help revive the fortunes of the ailing telcos. Local news portal @Verdade reports that the two telcos have accumulated debts of more than MZN14 billion (USD230 million).

According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, TDM is 90% state owned, with the remainder sold to management and employees in 2014; mCel is currently a wholly owned subsidiary of TDM.

Source: TeleGeography

GHANAIAN CELLCOS INSTRUCTED TO COVER UNSERVED AREA

The Federal Government on Tuesday in Abuja said it would build a $1 billion dollar ICT company to boost indigenous technology.

The Acting President Yemi Osinbajo made this known in his opening address at the 2017 Digital Africa Conference and Exhibition.

The theme of the event is “the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Getting Africa Ready”.

According to him, such feat will make Nigeria no longer a dumping ground for ICT products and services.

“The Nigerian government is committed to encourage the growth of indigenous ICT companies to world standards by proving policies that will help them thrive.

“With the mantra of change, the Nigerian political milieu will be recalibrated for the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“So that both the executive and legislative will be more responsive and responsible in addressing the major global challenges staring us in the face,” he said.

The acting president, who was represented the Minister of Communications, Adebayo Shittu, said the event was to seek ways of leapfrogging development.

The Minister of Communication, represented by the permanent secretary in the ministry, Sunday Echono, said the government was preparing for the Fourth Industrial Revolution predicted to happen globally in the very near future.

According to him, the Federal Government has conceived a National ICT Park and Exhibition Centre in the Federal Capital Territory.

“The establishment of the centre will encourage investment in ICT sector and complement the proposed University of ICT which will also produce required skilled manpower for Africa to partake in inevitable Fourth Industrial Revolution.”

In his welcome address, Dar Evan Woherem, Chairman Digital Africa Global Consult Ltd. said the gathering was to move Africa from its current technological position forward.

“It will move it to a point of singular where it will adopt technology to drive for its growth and development.

“In the First Industrial Revolution, we shifted from reliance on animals, human effort and biomass as primary sources of energy to the use of fossil fuels and the mechanical power that this enabled.

“In the Second Industrial Revolution, we had major breakthroughs in the form of electricity distribution, both wireless and wired communication, and new forms of power generation.

“The Third Industrial Revolution began with the development of digital and communication systems, bringing about advances in computing power, which has enhanced new ways of generating, processing and sharing information,” he said. (NAN)

Source: Premium Times

SOUTH AFRICA: IS PIVOTS WITH NEW CLOUDWAN PLATFORM

Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions (IS) has launched a new wide-area networking technology solution called CloudWAN, which it believes will fundamentally change the way it services corporate customers in the coming years and also transform the way it does business.

The company said the platform, based on software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) technology, will reduce complexity in enterprise network environments by delivering network functions as a virtualised service.

The platform uses software-defined networking and “network function virtualisation” to link public and private cloud computing environments into an “elastic” virtual network, IS said.

IS MD Saki Missaikos said the company has invested tens of millions of rand in the CloudWAN platform, and will continue to invest in it as it moves its corporate clients across from older technologies, including MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching — a common way of carrying data across high-performance networks.The new platform turns an enterprise network into a “programmable entity for traditional network device deployment and upgrades, simplifying management and automating control of the network”.

The platform, which was built in Silicon Valley by NTT i3, a subsidiary of Dimension Data parent Nippon Telegraph & Telephone, was created with open standards in mind, Missaikos said.

SIGNIFICANT SHIFT

“The whole software-defined networking space is still very new and very young,” he said. It will require a significant shift in the way that IS does business. Already, it has had to start shifting from a network engineering skillset to one that embraces software engineering skills.

In essence, IS is providing networking as a service, much like companies like Microsoft and Adobe provide software as a service. Missaikos said it represents a significant shift in approach for IS.

“We are giving clients a lot more flexibility, the ability to change their technology requirements on the fly as their business requirements change,” he said.

“We’re giving CIOs a lot more visibility [into the network]and the ability to self-service, which in the past we were reluctant to [offer them]. In effect, we are taking our back-office and giving it to our clients,” he said. “That presents an element of vulnerability [for us], but if we don’t do it we will be left behind. This is as big as the shift to MPLS was 15 years ago.”

He said it could take a decade to migrate IS’s corporate clients to CloudWAN, and he emphasised that the company is not killing off its MPLS offering. “We will have a hybrid model for five to 10 years, but eventually it will be at the core of what we are doing.”

IS said that by delivering cloud-based, centralised network provision and management, CloudWAN overcomes the biggest drawbacks of legacy network technologies.

Greg Montjoie, executive head for SDN and Internet at IS, said companies usually invest in private network services using MPLS. But data traffic and network complexity between business sites is increasingly substantial.

‘PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE’

“As multitudes of devices in numerous sites are added to an enterprise WAN, existing network technologies are increasingly restrictive, prohibitively expensive and can no longer guarantee quick and reliable network connections,” Montjoie said.

Enterprise WANs today require network hardware such as hubs, routers, switches, proxy servers and firewalls, as well as network architects and engineers to install, then connect, configure and test the hardware manually.

“CloudWAN turns an enterprise network into a programmable entity for traditional network device deployment and upgrades, simplifying management and automating control of the network,” IS said.

Said Montjoie: “Software-defined networking is leading to open communication protocols and application programming interfaces that are device-agnostic but still offer the same security, reliability and resiliency of vendor-proprietary hardware and appliances. This will lead to significant cost-savings for enterprises as they scale their networks.”

He explained that when an additional site such as a new warehouse, branch or outlet needs to be added to an enterprise network, the configurations and appropriate application rule sets are instantly deployed to that site. The configuration profiles are pre-set according to the client’s grouping structure.

“Traditional networks are bottlenecks that hamper business growth, but we’re well on the way to changing that,” said Montjoie. “I anticipate that software-defined networking will disrupt business ICT as dramatically as the cloud did.”

Source: NewsCentral Media (Tech Central)