Tuesday, February 01, 2005
E-cart before e-horse policy?
My view - by Dr Dayo Ogunyemi
ACCRA- In the West, e-commerce and other internet-driven innovations were natural by-products of largely unfettered private sector entrepreneurial zeal applied to communications network access that relentlessly improved in terms of accessibility and quality. Among the global e-innovators e-policy followed e-business, which was enabled by an explosion in internet usage fueled by increasingly cheap and fast internet bandwidth.
In Africa, governments are laboring to implement e-policies and e-government initiatives without adequately attending to network/bandwidth access issues.
The primacy of bandwidth
The point is simple – network access, including cheap and abundant internet bandwidth, is the lifeblood of e-commerce and other net applications. And in many African countries, like those with SAT-3 connectivity, external bandwidth connectivity is no longer the bottleneck it used to be. Yet private sector players, eager and capable of developing last-mile solutions, are starved of affordable external bandwidth.
This restriction is mainly artificial – external connectivity is often controlled by the state-owned (ex-) monopoly or its successor, who frequently engages in what is at worst anti-competitive, or at best mindlessly, bureaucratic pricing and distribution practices, untrammeled by any meaningful regulatory oversight.
For all the rhetoric about commitment to ICT and the transformative potential of internet-based applications like e-commerce and the proliferation of e-everything initiatives (on good old paper), few African countries have stepped up to take action on this crucial issue.
First, do no harm
There is no question that other, more pro-active steps can subsequently (or simultaneously) be taken to create an enabling policy environment for developing the knowledge society; including the use of incentives to stimulate the use of domestic service providers and deploy local content.
But, are African governments doing anything, even within capacity constraints, to ensure widespread access? If governments stifle the innovation that even small to mid-sized enterprises can implement, who will invest to solve the more intractable issues – rural infrastructure and universal access?
Governments must match their rhetoric with action – and this is one of the few areas that many governments are in a position, with a stroke of the policy pen, to enable great change and progress.
As we Africans make global demands on bridging the digital divide, let us remove all our self-imposed obstacles at home. There’s not much point challenging the status-quo on IP-number allocation, when we have bandwidth capacity unallocated and underutilized because domestic monopolies price it out of reach.
From South Africa, to Ghana, to Nigeria – almost universally in Africa – the private sector will tell anyone who bothers to ask them that this is the most pressing internet issue they face, even before internet governance. Abandoning protectionist arguments in defense of telco incumbents would really demonstrate that African governments understand that this is a burning issue and are willing to do their part to make the African information society a reality.
Good for voice, good for data
Some will argue that external connectivity is too complex or difficult to be dealt with so rapidly. However, Africa’s recent history is replete with examples where such bold steps – with fixed and mobile line liberalisation, with VOIP, with the deployment of VSAT for data – have met with an overwhelming response by both private sector investors and consumers.
Any country that takes this bold step would likely start a virtuous cycle in motion, as the experience across Africa with GSM has shown. Lower wholesale connectivity prices would result in wider, and better quality access domestically as private sector players deploy new technologies like Wi-Max to address the last mile problem.
Other technologies such as VOIP could justify connectivity roll-out even to rural areas as entrepreneurs seize on it as an efficient and price-competitive response to Africa’s proven appetite for voice traffic. This would in turn spur domestic infrastructure development – with data networks serving both data and voice demand. That domestic infrastructure, combined with intra-regional internet exchanges, could further stimulate domestic and regional internet demand.
Nobody move?
All it requires is one brave government to set that crucial first example by unshackling its private sector by removing external bandwidth connectivity from the dominant telco’s control and making it available on a wholesale basis to all comers at prices just above cost. It may well set in motion Africa’s best shot at bridging domestic rural-urban and international digital divide and solving the challenges of e-literacy through the local web deployment of African content in African languages. As Africa comes together in Accra 2005 to chart its digital future, will there be any takers?
ACCRA- In the West, e-commerce and other internet-driven innovations were natural by-products of largely unfettered private sector entrepreneurial zeal applied to communications network access that relentlessly improved in terms of accessibility and quality. Among the global e-innovators e-policy followed e-business, which was enabled by an explosion in internet usage fueled by increasingly cheap and fast internet bandwidth.
In Africa, governments are laboring to implement e-policies and e-government initiatives without adequately attending to network/bandwidth access issues.
The primacy of bandwidth
The point is simple – network access, including cheap and abundant internet bandwidth, is the lifeblood of e-commerce and other net applications. And in many African countries, like those with SAT-3 connectivity, external bandwidth connectivity is no longer the bottleneck it used to be. Yet private sector players, eager and capable of developing last-mile solutions, are starved of affordable external bandwidth.
This restriction is mainly artificial – external connectivity is often controlled by the state-owned (ex-) monopoly or its successor, who frequently engages in what is at worst anti-competitive, or at best mindlessly, bureaucratic pricing and distribution practices, untrammeled by any meaningful regulatory oversight.
For all the rhetoric about commitment to ICT and the transformative potential of internet-based applications like e-commerce and the proliferation of e-everything initiatives (on good old paper), few African countries have stepped up to take action on this crucial issue.
First, do no harm
There is no question that other, more pro-active steps can subsequently (or simultaneously) be taken to create an enabling policy environment for developing the knowledge society; including the use of incentives to stimulate the use of domestic service providers and deploy local content.
But, are African governments doing anything, even within capacity constraints, to ensure widespread access? If governments stifle the innovation that even small to mid-sized enterprises can implement, who will invest to solve the more intractable issues – rural infrastructure and universal access?
Governments must match their rhetoric with action – and this is one of the few areas that many governments are in a position, with a stroke of the policy pen, to enable great change and progress.
As we Africans make global demands on bridging the digital divide, let us remove all our self-imposed obstacles at home. There’s not much point challenging the status-quo on IP-number allocation, when we have bandwidth capacity unallocated and underutilized because domestic monopolies price it out of reach.
From South Africa, to Ghana, to Nigeria – almost universally in Africa – the private sector will tell anyone who bothers to ask them that this is the most pressing internet issue they face, even before internet governance. Abandoning protectionist arguments in defense of telco incumbents would really demonstrate that African governments understand that this is a burning issue and are willing to do their part to make the African information society a reality.
Good for voice, good for data
Some will argue that external connectivity is too complex or difficult to be dealt with so rapidly. However, Africa’s recent history is replete with examples where such bold steps – with fixed and mobile line liberalisation, with VOIP, with the deployment of VSAT for data – have met with an overwhelming response by both private sector investors and consumers.
Any country that takes this bold step would likely start a virtuous cycle in motion, as the experience across Africa with GSM has shown. Lower wholesale connectivity prices would result in wider, and better quality access domestically as private sector players deploy new technologies like Wi-Max to address the last mile problem.
Other technologies such as VOIP could justify connectivity roll-out even to rural areas as entrepreneurs seize on it as an efficient and price-competitive response to Africa’s proven appetite for voice traffic. This would in turn spur domestic infrastructure development – with data networks serving both data and voice demand. That domestic infrastructure, combined with intra-regional internet exchanges, could further stimulate domestic and regional internet demand.
Nobody move?
All it requires is one brave government to set that crucial first example by unshackling its private sector by removing external bandwidth connectivity from the dominant telco’s control and making it available on a wholesale basis to all comers at prices just above cost. It may well set in motion Africa’s best shot at bridging domestic rural-urban and international digital divide and solving the challenges of e-literacy through the local web deployment of African content in African languages. As Africa comes together in Accra 2005 to chart its digital future, will there be any takers?
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