Message-ID: <0098EB8EC75F1380.00002B9D@tmar.com> Date: Tue, 11 Apr 1995 12:18:11 EST From: "Chuck B. at Ext. 214" <mailto:chuckb@TMAR.COM> Subject: A third posting worth forwarding To: Multiple recipients of list DEVEL-L
And the third, also about telecom (with interesting references
to space-based technologies).
c.b.
.
.
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Date: Sat, 8 Apr 1995 10:55:00 EDT
Subject: African net symposium
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
/* Written 12:20 pm Apr 5, 1995 by mailto:Ben.Parker@hornet.sasa.unep.no in
web:list.africana */
/* ---------- "African Symposium" ---------- */
From: mailto:Ben.Parker@hornet.sasa.unep.no (Ben Parker)
Let's get Africa's act together, and head for the highway
Users, donors and policymakers start face-to-face networking
by Tony Hall
A full house of telematics conference delegates at Africa Hall
in Addis Ababa yesterday heard a range of high level calls for
coordination so that Africa can be ready for full Internet
connectivity, and move on to the Information Superhighway with
it own strategies and priorities in order.
Just as telematics has rapidly brought together the worlds
of computing and
telecommunications, so telecoms authorities and electronic
networkers must get to know each other and work together + and
so must the different networking projects around the continent.
That was the thrust of a number of addresses from senior
representatives of international and government agencies at the
opening of the week-long African Regional Symposium on
Telematics for Development conference at the UN Economic
Commission for Africa (ECA) headquarters in the Ethiopian
capital.
The gathering of more than 250 information specialists,
users, donors and
policymakers is the first to focus on telematics. It brings
policymakers and users face to face, at a crucial time to share
ideas and work out ways of easing national regulations and fees
to usher Africa into the information age.
Opening the conference, UNECA's Acting Executive Secretary
Makha Sarr said
the use of telematics is a prerequisite for scientific, social
and economic development, and all African countries must head
for the information highway. He pointed to information's crucial
role in regional and subregional initiatives in Africa. He said
ECA was proud to have played a big part, through the CABECA
project funded by Canada's IDRC, in helping to set up networks
in more than 20 African countries, with international e-mail
connection via FidoNet, through the GreenNet gateway in London.
Sarr was confident that the conference would come up with
concrete measures to strengthen coordination in Africa, such as
the possible setting up of a high-level group on communications.
The effect of telematics on daily life, and even on
individual feelings,
was noted by Asrat Bulbula of the Ethiopian Science and
Technology Commission. "The cost savings and convenience is
changing our social and office activities...advancing individual
feelings towards jobs and computer communications. Electronic
communications is improving...the sharing and organising of
non-computing resources."
He said that while Africa's attention for thirty years has
been focused on
basic needs, it now faces the challenge of technology. "We
should embrace advanced telematics services to build our
research capacity...Telematics is a need and not a choice."
Today, fewer than 20 African countries have no form of
electronic
connection, 33 have networks and four have full Internet
connectivity. Ethiopia, through ECA's PADISnet, is one of the
33. It was through PADISnet that the Ethiopian Scientific
Society in North America was contacted to collect modems and
other networking equipment for the academic community back home.
Bulbula noted the major contribution of African regional
networking
projects such as UNESCO's RINAF, the French government-sponsored
ORSTOM-RIO, and REFER, in building sustainable cooperative
networks in West Africa and beyond, to Kenya and Madagascar,
"from which robust, high bandwidth networks can evolve." More
resources are needed to evolve from low cost, low bandwidth
networks to full TCP/IP connections. The exchange of information
on connectivity is one of the areas where regional cooperation
is required.
UNESCO's Informatics Programme chairman G. Biorci pointed to
freedom of the
press, and pluralism in the mass media, as among the challenges
arising from the information revolution. "It gives libraries and
newspapers a new way of existing."
Johan Ernberg of the International Telecommunications Union,
oldest of all
the UN agencies, said ITU would try to see where it can help in
the development of some kind of regional mechanism for African
user involvement.
IDRC's David Balson said Africa is on a cusp, at a point
where big projects
will get under way + "some of which won't make sense unless done
in a coordinated fashion. Hopefully, there will be moves towards
more rationalising of investment, as we move towards the
Internet."
Johannesburg-based specialist Mike Jensen, who has played a
major part in
helping to set up and maintain networks around Africa in recent
years, outlined some of the future scenarios of daily life. "It
is up to us," he said, "to chart a path for African involvement
in the global information infrastructure...Our first task is to
get Africa connected to the Internet as soon as possible."
Africa's telephone statistics are forbidding: 12 per cent
of the world's
people, but only 2 per cent of its phone lines. Its inhabitants
each spend less than a minute a year on the telephone. Local
calls are relatively cheap, but it has the world's highest use
of international to local lines, and the highest line
installation costs. It can cost $25 to send a single page fax.
But radio is providing more and more interesting and
attractive options.
For instance VHF line of sight services over 50 km will be
increasingly important in providing users with alternatives to
cable-based local loops, with radio-based systems operating at
lower costs.
Space-based systems will be increasingly important, such as
the low-orbit
satellites used by the agencies HealthNet, Satellife, and
VITAnet, which send messages as the satellite passes overhead.
And VSAT will become very important in providing cost-effective
national links, with personal earth stations at around $10,000,
and $1,000 a month to run.
Among Africa's major roadblocks in reaching the highway are
low
availability of high bandwidth and digital systems + and very
high telecommunications tariffs in Africa. "It will require
significant sensitisation," said Jensen, "to persuade PTTs to
forego these revenues."
Mustapha Masmoudi, a former Tunisian ambassador and
minister, now director
of a mass media institute for the Mediterranean region, looked
at the highway's horizons from the African policymakers'
perspective, and sounded some cautionary notes about the way to
go, to develop what he called "Africa's highways."
Many benefits lay ahead in opening up telecommunications,
but the state
monopoly could not be abolished without having a well-developed
civil society and national private sector + because the
multinationals would not take care of the social aspect of
telematics development.
Following liberalisation, could the funds be found for
private projects?
"The banks are not reacting. This is one of the major problems."
The question of the African information highways needed to be on
the next OAU agenda. The role of the public services in the
information world should be defined, and regulations developed
to reduce telecommunications costs and fees.
text:1050 words approx
Sidebar:
Wonderful WWW
A way to repatriate Africa's exiled data analyses
A feature of the first day at the telematics symposium was a
live full-screen demonstration of World Wide Web: a laptop
computer called up full colour pages, words and pictures, within
minutes, from three distant parts of the world, using a
networking system so powerful and attractive that subscribers to
WWW are likely to outnumber telephone subscribers round the
world in the near future.
Mounting the show, to be the first of several, were some of
the top
"techies" at the symposium. GreenNet's Karen Banks from London,
with Mike Jensen, set up the PADISnet link through FidoNet, to
the GreenNet gateway to the Internet, and on to the World Wide
Web.
The World Bank Electronic Media Centre's Chief Pilot Peter
Knight linked up
with the Washington centre, also talked about a brand new
development from Cornell University the "CU-SeeMe"
teleconferencing software, which allows up to eight different
sites, each showing a real-time black and white image in front
of a computer screen, or video. It may be exotic technology now,
"but remember," said Knight, "all technology costs are falling
by 50 per cent every 18 months."
He moved on to Russia, to call up a page from the WWW server
of a friend who used to develop spy satellites for the Soviet
Union, and now runs a private innovative Russian company called
"Elvis plus".
ITU's Thomas Fried called up home pages in Geneva and showed
the meeting how to navigate through the ITU's information
sources.
Julie Sisskind, coordinator of the University of
Pennsylvania's African
Studies World-Wide Web, navigated into one of her "home pages"
and through the directories, pointing out: "We have every
possible kind of information on Africa that an "Internaut" could
want, with direct two-way Africa-US database links." As a WWW
provider, African Studies at Penn is now developing multimedia
projects that incorporate a mixture of text, video, sound,
graphics and links to other African resources on the Internet.
These interactive documents or hypertexts, Sisskind explained,
facilitate a whole new way of presenting information, and a new
forum for Africans communicating around the world.
And, as Peter Knight put it this is the way to repatriate
data analyses
that have left Africa.