| News Page | Tourism | Mekelle | Ethio-Links |
|
Internet Access Quality and Wrong Investment in ETC I read an article on the plans of the ETC to launch mobile Internet services soon. First, I was stunned and could not understand the point, and then I was puzzled. Why would one need mobile Internet services? Can one really make a justifiable business case for such an investment? Shouldn't ETC perhaps invest in improving the poor quality of Internet service it now provides its subscribers at home and in the office? I was in Ethiopia last October and my experience with the Internet connection was like a dream that gets fulfilled only once every 10 to 20 minutes. During busy hours it gets even worse, becoming more like praying to God for a few raindrops during a dry season. Once you have access you may think you can send an attachment or open an email uninterrupted. But this hardly ever happens. More often, it is like a lottery draw to open and read a normal email in Ethiopia. The main bottleneck is the bandwidth or connection capacity to the international route (i.e., AT&T, Sprint, etc.) I do not have actual figures but I am sure this is below 1 Gbps. (1Gbp = Giga bits per second is 1000 Million bits per second, where 10 bits is equivalent to one character (e.g. a, b, c, 1, 2, 3, +, -, etc.) The access speed to the service provider I get in my home in Sweden is 10Milion bits per second enabling me to send 1 million characters per second. That data could be pages of information, pictures, animations, etc. As part of my subscription, I get five e-mail addresses and three home pages. I have no per minute of use fee, (unlimited access!) and for all that I only pay a fixed monthly fee equivalent to 250 Birr. The quality is very high and I often reach 95% of the promised access speed (with some exceptions in accessing the WWW). ETC promises to offer the dialed-up Internet customer a transmission speed of about 50Kbps, which is 1/200 the capacity I have at home. Even with that, people here often struggle to get through with speeds of 10 letters per second, compared to 1/200 the capacity promised to be provided by ETC. At busy hours the speed bottoms down to a level of zero. And what about the subscription fee? It starts with a connection fee of 330 Birr + 60 Birr set up fee + monthly fee of 23 Birr + 0.10 Birr fee per minute of use (since one can do only so much in a minute the real price per characters sent or received will end up at around a 100 times more than the fee I pay in Sweden). This will make Ethiopia a country one of the poorest quality, and yet with the most expensive Internet access in the world. Given these facts, why would ETC want to invest in mobile Internet in Ethiopia? If people are having difficulty sending or opening their emails from home or office with the existing setup, why would they want to do it on the move from a car, or while walking? By the way mobile Internet (also known as wireless internet) is still new and has not really taken off in US or Europe as was anticipated it would. Though Scandinavia is supposed to be ahead of many countries, service providers are not making any money on it because of its limited use. People are still reluctant to surf the Internet on a small handsets due to many reasons. In the first place, the mobile phone is far behind the PC when it comes to displays or text editing. It is still cumbersome and time consuming to key in data. Secondly, GPRS has lots of overheads, and in reality one is very limited with speeds much under 50Kbs; thirdly natural factors render radio communications prone to be affected by all types of environmental factors, resulting in the mobile communication of far poorer quality than a PC on a telephone line. Fourthly price per information sent or received becomes much more expensive than with telephone lines. There was a lot of hype that people would read email and news, download ring tones, pictures, etc. on their cell phones while on the move. However, this vision has yet to be realized. I do not grudge ETC and the new technology for Ethiopia, but wish it made business sense, and was what most people would use in order to expedite business communications and improve their daily lives. It would also be important to get some light on the ADSL service. Who are the customers in Ethiopia? If one cannot guarantee dialed-up 50Kbs in the present PC setup, how can one provide a service to subscribers requiring speeds that are more than ten times the existing capacity? Possibly, one might guarantee a higher speed between a subscriber, the DSLAM and a specific server within Ethiopia, but that falls far short of providing a satisfactory broadband service. Engineer Berhe Hagos Corporate Service Developments Director TeliaSonera, Sweden The Author is the Global Director for the Development of New Mobile Services in TeliaSonera, one of the largest service providers in Scandinavia, Turkey, the Baltic, and Russia. Engineer Berhe has 21 years experience in tele and data communications, and has worked as the marketing director for Africa and the Middle East with Ericsson. He was a key player in the first mobile launch and various other important telecommunications activities in Ethiopia representing Ericsson in the 90s. berhe.hagos@teliasonera.com www.tigrai.net |