Global telecoms solutions provider, Ericsson is advocating for the adoption of the open access model. This comes in time as Kenya’s IT sector is preparing to benefit from faster connectivity and Internet speeds arising from the deployment of 4G or Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks.

In a media workshop on LTE held today, David Ochanda, Ericsson Kenya business development director, said that the open access model would ensure that all parts of the country are covered by the technology, resulting to enhanced broadband penetration in the country.

With open access infrastructure will be made available to clients other than the owners for a fee. Open access being telecoms and in this case the LTE.

“The Open Access model – if adopted by the Kenya government and by extension the IT industry – will see the network being deployed countrywide. When left to deploy the LTE network as proposed in the consortium model, the MNOs will only focus on high potential areas where they can get maximum revenues thereby further minimizing access to broadband services by under-served regions,” said Ochanda.

He added that Kenya was meant to be the pioneer in Open Access before other countries in the region can learn from it. However, this is not the case,he thought, as this has been realized by Rwanda and is expected to lead the region by deploying its LTE through the Open Access.

Ericsson’s workshop came at a time when various models have been proposed for the LTE deployment in the country, through the state regulator Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) forming a 9-member association to lead the deployment.

The 9-member LTE association includes the Kenya government (through Treasury) as well as Safaricom, Telkom Kenya-Orange, Airtel, Essar Telecom’s yuKenya, KDN, MTN, Alcatel-Lucent and Epesi Communications. It was set up to implement the initial phase of the country’s LTE project at cost of Kshs 8.4 billion.

The mobile network operators in the association – Safaricom, Telkom Kenya, Airtel and yuKenya – were expected to provide their masts and BTS under a shared-infrastructure model while the equipment makers reach a formula on how to roll out the network.

Notably, Ericsson proposed to build a country-wide 4G/LTE network for free and recover the costs after a 15-year period.  

Industry statistics indicate that by 2020, it is projected that the ICT industry will have moved to 5G technology, with much of the data traffic expected to come from smart devices like home appliances rather than phones and tablets.

Already, Ericsson has deployed LTE/4G networks in several African countries – among these being Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Angola and Botswana.   

The Municipality of Johannesburg reassured the city residence that their personal information was not compromised by the hacking of the City’s billing systems.

“The City of Jo’burg has experienced an unfortunate breach of its information technology system, which has been widely reported in the media,” said spokesman Gabu Tugwana. “The city would like to assure its residents that this is an isolated incident; the necessary legal and technical steps are being taken to prevent similar incidents in future.”

Eyewitness News reported that the municipality’s online services system was temporarily shut down on Tuesday, the 20 August, after it became possible for anyone with an Internet connection to view municipal invoices.

Tugwana said at no stage was any resident’s personal information, such as banking details or ID numbers, compromised.

“The information that was accessed was not from the transactional engine of the billing system of the City of Jo’burg and the perpetrators were not able to transact on any of the information they accessed. The city is busy with its own forensic investigation with its IT partner to assist the police with the criminal case that will be opened at as a result of this incident,” said the spokesman.

Any future breach aimed at stealing personal or municipal information would be regarded as a crime. The municipality promised to keep residents informed about any development on the security rupture and the actions taken to insure it was dealt with effectively.

Residents who needed a copy of their accounts were advised to visit their their nearest customer service centre or call the municipality’s call centre.

The border post of South Africa has now gone digital as the SA Revenue Service (SARS) has introduced a new digital customs management systems.

“This is a very important milestone,” Gordhan told media at Megawatt Park in Sunninghill, Johannesburg. “We will be one of the few countries in the world that has completely digitized customs processes,” said the Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.

The new system centralizes the clearing of all import and export declarations and uses a single processing engine. This helps to reduce red tape. The system was effective on 17th August after running at the same time with the old one for six months during a testing phase.

“This digitized customs process helps legal trade to happen and happen faster,” Gordhan explained.

“There has been a huge reduction in time for those that are legitimate traders. What the system does is to make it [trade] fully electronic, get many middle people out of the way and allows businesses to get their goods quickly,” he added.

The minister said that last year more than 4.3 million containers worth R2.5 trillion moved across the country’s borders, adding that SARS customs officials used about 16 million pieces of paper to process 5.5 million declarations received at the time

“The customs management system now eliminates virtually 99 percent if not all of that paper,” he said.

Gordhan said the new system would improve competitiveness and reduce crime by detecting unlawful goods more promptly. It had better security and risk detection elements meaning that people “can’t play around with the numbers”.

Renewable energy sources seem will be the answer to Africa’s lighting problem, as a new report by IFC and World Bank indicate that more people in the continent will have access to clean energy by 2015.

The report, Lighting Africa Market Trends Report 2012 – Overview of an the Off-Grid Lighting Market in Africa  indicates that 600 million Africans still use the expensive and unreliable sources of lighting such as kerosene.

With this hindsight, the IFC and World Bank launched a programme titled, Lighting Africa to spread the use of solar devices for lighting African homes.

In the last three years this sector for solar lighting gadgets has seen a rise of 300 per cent. This is also fuelled by the fact that bigger corporation such as TOTAL, Panasonic and Energizer are getting into the space.

“IFC and the World Bank are committed to ensuring consumers gain better access to products that meet basic needs. With the price declines in raw materials and solar panels, off-grid lamps are becoming increasingly affordable and within reach for rural households that lack electricity. Lighting Africa on track to reach 250 million people without electricity by 2030,” Itotia Njagi, Lighting Africa’s Program Manager, said.

Current product offerings have benefited from a decline in manufacturing costs while quality has improved with longer battery life, increased brightness and new features such as mobile phone charging and pay-as-you-go options from the current product offering becoming more common, the report denoted.

Mobile solutions beyond Value-Added Services firm, Mahindra Comviva has partnered with Vantrix, a pioneer in mobile video optimization and delivery solutions in a bid to effectively manage, optimize and monetize the explosive growth of video traffic that service providers are experiencing in their markets.

According to their release statement, the deal will see Vantrix’s advanced video optimization solution, Bandwidth Optimizer integrated with Mahindra Comviva’s Mobile Data Platform (MDP), targeted at addressing the broadband traffic and specifically Video Traffic for Policy Management, Optimization and Monetization (MOM).

The parties expect the  solution to enable service providers to manage, optimize and monetize their mobile broadband video traffic while offering their subscribers a high performance and rich media experience, leading to increased data adoption and reduced network congestion.

Madan G. Onkar, Vice President, Internet and Broadband Solutions, Mahindra Comviva said, “Given the explosive growth in the video traffic and the increase in broadband subscribers globally, it’s imperative that video traffic is managed and delivered intelligently, in the most optimal manner. It contributes to a significant portion of the service providers’ data revenue today. We are excited to extend our partnership with Vantrix to jointly offer the policy-based video optimization solution to our customers worldwide.”

A recent study shows that mobile video traffic exceeded 50% in 2012 and it is predicted that by 2017, video will generate 66.5% of all mobile data traffic. Globally the internet video users will be 2 billion by 2017. At the same time, mobile video traffic in Africa is predicted to grow 27 fold from 2013 to 2017 at a compound annual growth rate of 93 per cent. Video will be 72 per cent of Africa’s mobile data traffic in 2017, compared to 47 per cent at the end of 2012.

“Today, it is evident that video content consumption is the key driver for data traffic growth on service provider networks. These providers need to manage the growing costs of this demand, offer a compelling experience to their customers and enable new revenue opportunities,” said Alex Staddon-Smith, Sr. Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development, Vantrix. “We are delighted to partner with Mahindra Comviva to deliver a best-in-class solution to address these challenges.  Our solution, Bandwidth Optimizer, is designed to improve the overall end user experience, while at the same time optimize the delivery of video content and enable monetization opportunities for our clients.”

Mahindra Comviva has more than a decade of experience in managing mobile data pipes for over 80 service providers across 40+ countries globally while Vantrix solutions are deployed in over 75 mobile networks, serving more than one billion subscribers in five continents. Vantrix has worked with Mahindra Comviva with their media transcoding for its Multimedia Messaging Service Center (MMSC) suite and RCSe compliant IMPS suite.

Verve International, the firm behind Verve payment card brand has partnered with First Registrars to launch FirstDividend Plus Prepaid Card,   a ‘first of its kind’ prepaid card issued to shareholders into which dividend amounts due to them are automatically credited.

Mr. Bayo Olugbemi, Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer of First Registrars Limited, said,“Our organisation has committed tremendous human and financial resources to the creation of strategic IT enabled products and services that are geared towards making share registration management and procedures seamless for all stakeholders in the business.”

The launch of FirstDividend Plus Prepaid Card is also expected to address unclaimed dividend (especially amongst retail shareholders) which has been a challenge in the capital market.

The partners add that the Verve branded FirstDividend Plus Prepaid Card was designed to support the financial inclusion drive of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) as part of the cashless policy. It addresses a local challenge with an innovative solution, which is critical to the adoption and acceptance of e-payment services.  Hence, all shareholders, whether with bank accounts or not, are able to receive their unpaid dividends.

The card works simply.

Once the shareholder receives the card, the shareholder is ready to receive dividends, which is credited to the card immediately the payment is authorized.

The beneficiary of the dividend can then withdraw the funds at an ATM, transfer it to his/her preferred bank account, or spend the funds at any of the 130,000 POS terminals and 1,000 websites where Verve is accepted in Nigeria.

Mr. Charles Ifedi, Chief Executive Officer, Verve International, said:“Verve is proud to have been selected to support this new product which is the first of its kind. Verve and First Registrars are both market leaders and provide innovative homegrown solutions to address Nigeria’s e-banking needs. This revolutionary new product will ensure all shareholders, including the unbanked, do not suffer lost income.”

A new report by ReportsnReports suggests that the South African Healthcare IT market will grow at 8.8 percent by 2016.

“One of the key factors contributing to healthcare IT market growth in South Africa is the increasing need to store patient information and use it to provide appropriate/better healthcare services,” the report said.

“The healthcare IT market in South Africa has been witnessing the increased application of mobile technology. However, the high capital needed to adopt IT systems/technology could pose a challenge to the growth of this market.”

The country has seen many developments that merge mobile technology with health care. Vodafone has come up with programmes that aim to improve the health sectors. From patient management service to tools that help medical practitioners.

Huawei introduces the Huawei S12700, which is an agile network architecture technology and agile switch.

Huawei is the global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider. The S12700 has a design developed from a service and user experience perspective and supports higher reliability and larger ethernet frames.

This technology features the key attributes required to support new industry trends including: cloud computing, bring your own device (BYOD), software-defined network (SDN), internet of things (IoT), and big data-related analytics for business use.

In launching the first service and user experience, centred agile network architecture, Huawei has for the first time introduced SDN architecture into campus networks. This has enabled networks to provide more efficient and agile services, and evolve from single-node service processing into full-scale management and control. Huawei S12700 switch forms part of the industry’s most advanced series of agile switches and is expected to lead a new revolution in Ethernet switching technology and network construction. Featuring automatic network deployment and management, the S12700 supports end-to-end (E2E) security collaboration with the flexibility for fast-changing services and full programmability.

The inevitable trends of broadband services, multimedia, mobility and social networking are shifting the focus of networks from technologies and devices to services, users and experiences,” said William Xu, CEO of the Huawei Enterprise Business Group. “Huawei is committed to customer-centric innovation and open collaboration with the industry, and leveraging our 10 years’ experience in enhancing IP network capabilities to best meet the needs of our customers. With the launch of the industry’s first agile network and agile switch that focus on service efficiency and user experience, I am confident that we will change the future of next-generation enterprise networks.”

Some of the challenges that the S12700 is bound to experience in the first changing era of internet usage include, insufficient service processing capability, fault location difficulties, and slow service responses.

“Campus network infrastructure is experiencing a rapid evolution due to the dynamic nature of enterprise mobility and BYOD roll outs, cloud services and applications, real-time multimedia and unified communication applications, as well as the need for a comprehensive approach to security across enterprise IT infrastructure. These innovation trends urge enterprises to enhance their abilities to support business and application needs. Huawei’s next-generation network architecture is aligned with these trends, which, along with its built-in programmable chip, will enable enterprises to meet future network requirements through emerging networking architectures, such as SDN,” said Rohit Mehra, vice-president of Network Infrastructure, IDC.