Home About Us Services Projects Press Staff Vacancies Contact us   ::   East Africa: 2010 - ICT's Year of Great Expectations Nairobi — The year 2010 promises plenty of excitement for the East Africa information and communication technologies arena. Enhanced competition among key players, new technologies and an ever growing demand for ICT services and products will make the future indeed look bright. Top on the expectation list is the stiff competition among three undersea fibre optic cables - Seacom, Teams and Eassy. Seacom and Teams have already landed on the East African coast, while Eassy is expected this year. Generally, it is perceived that the landing of the cables will drastically reduce the cost of communication, and rapidly increase Internet penetration from the current three million users and deliver the region to the true 21st century technologies. In addition, it is expected that the three marine cables will enhance competition in business process outsourcing (BPO), considered the vital link to the rest of the world. July 2009 was a watershed for the industry in the region when Seacom was switched on, setting an unprecedented wave of other cable projects. The 1.28 terabytes per second (Tb/s), 17,000-kilometre fibre optic cable system linking south and East Africa to global networks via India and Europe was completed and commissioned. Now, it is expected that the landing of the submarine fibre optic cables will further excite the small- and medium-business segments, where connectivity costs have hindered full adoption of technologies. Nevertheless, the switching on of two undersea marine cable is yet to bring Internet prices down. The "drastic" drop is yet to be experienced. Another animated sector that will keep East Africans happy will be the mobile telephony With a mobile user rate of 30 per cent today, the industry expected tremendous potential for growth. Price wars witnessed in the last quarter of last year intensified, much to the benefit of consumers. Key players will most definitely introduce new products and better services. This is the year that mobile telephony players will take data services a notch higher all in the name of raising revenue. The mobile phone market will also see the introduction of the latest high-end phones mainly to boost Internet and email access. Last year, Zain and Safaricom brought BlackBerry solutions that enabled the customer to access e-mails using advanced accessories. Orange, on the other hand, introduced the iPhone, but locked buyers to its network. In what appears to be growing interest from global firms in markets in Africa and other emerging regions, Nokia also launched its latest devices in the company's range of handsets focused on mapping and navigation, the Nokia 2710 Navigation Edition. Mobile money transfer It is also expected that the interest in the mobile money transfer services will increase. Taking cue from the successful M-Pesa mobile money transfer service of Safaricom and Zain's Zap, Essar Telecom Kenya (Yu) launched its money transfer platform (yuCash). Not to be left behind, Nokia says it is building a wide network of Nokia Money agents where consumers can deposit or withdraw cash from their accounts. Unlike the current service providers, Nokia Money will enable transactions to be done by subscribers to any network in the world. Nokia will roll out its service in partnership with Obopay, a service provider for payments via mobile phones in which Nokia bought a stake earlier this year. In addition, managed services will gain significant ground as communication costs decrease with the availability of new submarine Internet cables and as IT needs grow more complex with rapid technology change. The region, especially Kenya will be among countries to experience booming BPO industry. Currently contact centres are constrained by high communications costs. Mid last year, Kenya kicked off an ambitious Digital Villages project designed to connect the whole country, from rural to urban areas, and accelerate growth of ICT. The project is a government and private-sector initiative, mapped out using political districts. It is expected that every constituency represented in parliament will get a minimum of eight work stations, either PCs or monitors hooked to PCs, grouped within a 15-kilometre radius. It is also expected that other countries in the region will follow Kenya's example to migrate from analogue to digital broadcast. Kenya becomes the second nation in Africa after South Africa to adopt digital broadcasting. This has been hailed as the biggest technology shifting of TV broadcast after the colour television. Currently, transmission covers Nairobi and its environs. Key challenge however will be to properly capture, manage and deliver meaningful information to the right users which is putting a premium on data management and information access. Increased availability of broadband in Africa will exacerbate this explosion and companies will need to carefully control data management. It is also expected that there will be an even greater focus on data centre efficiency, IT consolidation and automation with the new environment reflecting concern around costs and improved utilisation rates of current assets. Most companies expanding into the region will look at acquiring companies with a majority stake (at least 51 per cent) this leads to headaches in terms of consolidating applications, systems and, of course, data centres. The sector will continue to be bombarded with malicious threats to IT infrastructure: viruses, spam, spyware, leakage, phishing, identify theft. Centralisation and the consolidation of data centre infrastructure will help improve physical security. by Philip Ngunjiri Author : Datafundi (U) Ltd    Published on : 2010-03-01

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