climate and comms

Government authorities have a key role to play in facilitating the emergence of a digital economy.    Their mission does not only entail adopting and enforcing appropriate and effective regulations but also ensuring that existing infrastructure is leveraged for optimal utilization.   The participants in this strategic workshop will work on ways to make governments and regulators true catalysts for digitalization, with the support of all sector players. This  is the subject matter of a discussion to be held at the Africa CEO Forum in Abidjan next week.  These are my initial thoughts.  All comments welcome. In Africa we have seen the emergence of a mobile telephony market which went from zero to over a billion phones in just over two decades.   The mobile industry requires tight regulation because of the use of a scarce resource – spectrum.    The role of Government has thus, of necessity,   been important in ...

--> All companies – large and small – have IT requirements.   Especially today in the age of big data where everything is connected and all functions are automated and digitised and need to be online.   Those enterprises that are large enough – such as banks, MNC’s, Telco’s, mining houses have been able to afford to build their own data centres to house their IT infrastructure.    Others like SME’s which could not afford to (build their own DC’s) opted for a ‘server room’ or outsourced some of their requirements to a Cloud provider. There are numerous challenges for all companies in respect of how they approach ensuring the reliable provision of IT capacity to run their businesses.    Some companies are not big enough to justify their own DC (scale) and there is a shortage of IT expertise (skill).    Often times those that have the scale to build their own DC’s   then run foul of not having the requisite skills to run the...

Building data centres in Africa is increasingly starting to grab the industry’s attention.   What are the key issues that are influencing the growth of data centre’s in Africa? The data centre industry continues to thrive globally and the big players are still seeing strong growth in mature markets and hence they have little incentive to start looking at smaller data centre’s in what is still perceived to be a high-risk market.   The players who are getting into Africa are going to be ‘specialists’ who see the niche and want to get a foothold early.   Not that there is going to be a shortage of opportunity as the installed base in Africa is still miniscule. The quality and nature of that installed base is variable with very few Tier 3 let alone Tier 4 data centre’s and many are in-house telco data centre’s.     Carrier neutral colocation data centre’s are few and far between.   There-in lies the opportunity.   There is more than suf...

The African data centre market consists primarily of in-house data centres built by banks, Telco’s and Governments for their own use.   This has been a function of the lack of availability of carrier neutral data centres.   However this is changing with the advent of companies like Teraco which are building World Class Tier 3 + data centres which use the latest technologies for managing power and cooling.   The power and cooling requirements of new technology servers and high density suites is leading to many legacy data centre facilities being unable to deliver the energy efficiency benefits of a new purpose-built facilities.    The operating costs of older data centres are thus becoming increasingly prohibitive with the life time cost of power exceeding the cost of building a new data centre. The increased requirement for digital and physical security has lead corporations to seek better and ultimately cheaper solutions by going outs...

After two days of data centre conferencing in Monaco what emerges is consensus about a few things.    The imminent impact of the Internet of Things, outsourcing, virtualization, Colocation and the ongoing migration to the Cloud,   but also the awareness that there exists a massive shortage of data centre capacity in Africa and the urgent need to address it.    There is more data centre capacity within the M25 of London than on the whole continent of Africa. However, where there is some disagreement is exactly how to go about it.   Where to build?   Who to build?   How to build?   Who to finance?     Doing business in Africa is not easy.   But we are inspired by JFK–– “ We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard ".       Africa is hardly the moon but to some people it might as well be! Power, that ever present bogeyman, seemingly presents one of our b...

The mobile operators have been the ‘unicorns’ of Africa for the last 20 years.    Consistently outperforming, not only their global peers, but also all other sectors in Africa – even resources.    Historically African MNO’s have enjoyed higher EBITDA margins than their developed market peers – but it seems the African mobile fairy tale is coming to an end as we approach the bewitching hour of midnight.   The nasty sisters of MTN’s Nigerian Cinderella have reared their ugly heads with the imposition of a punitive $5.2bn fine.     Like Apple, whose once unstoppable iPhone sales have started to slow, most African MNO’s   need to come up with something new and smart or risk marginalisation as demand slows.     The killer App in Africa to date has been voice – but this market is saturated now with   customers from the very bottom of the pyramid – and so voice ARPU’s have declined.    According...

Why build Data Centres in Africa when the rest of the World is better geared for them with power and connectivity and they continue to be built at a rapid pace in these advanced markets?     On the face of it – it makes more sense to continue hosting data and services in North Carolina or in Finland if you are an Africa corporate with data hosting and storage requirements. However things are changing in Africa.   “ Ex Africa semper aliquid novi ”   to quote Pliny the Elder – There’s always something new coming out of Africa.    What now?    Well there have been a few drivers.   Firstly there is now connectivity between Africa and the rest of the World.     Numerous submarine cables provide an instantaneous connection between the various landing points and the World Wide Web (in other words the Internet.)   Secondly there is a large effort to install fiber optic capacity within and between numerous African countr...

Starting in the mid 1990’s Africa underwent a ‘mobile revolution’ whereby from a standing start of below 1% telephone penetration (tele-density) -   the Continent now boasts over 800 million mobile phones.     By skipping the so-called ‘landline’ technologies the mobile operators leapfrogged a technology generation.   These mobile networks, it can be argued, have been a major contributor to the economic upswing the Continent has experienced since the start of the new millennium.     The mobile revolution is now over as growth has moderated and penetration levels started to peak.     However, a new revolution beckons - the Internet revolution.   Africa falls behind the Rest of the World when it comes to broadband with less than 15% penetration, mainly in the cities.    During the last 5 years numerous submarine cables have been installed, connecting Africa to the Globe.   These fibre-opti...

This was the week that Oscar Pistorius went on trial by media.   Forget about the lawyers -  this was ‘crowd sourced’  litigation at its finest;   fed by a torrent of tweets,  Tumblr images,  TV clips and banks of cameras that overwhelmed the tiny South African courtroom.   Opinions,  some informed, but mostly not,  spewed forth on social media proffering words of support and damnation in equal volume.     The tragic story of the horrific death of a beautiful young woman in her prime, the horror of an overcrowded courtroom and the legal sparring  (and this just the bail hearing!)  reveals the extent of modern society’s  collective voyeurism and pornographic  fascination with courtroom - celebrity mash up.     Oscar was a global icon after stepping off the Olympic podium last August in London.  This tragedy of death and fall from grace is one which has captivated the world.   The harsh ex...