climate and comms

  The Summer of 2022 will be remembered as the season when global temperature records were broken systematically.    When more temperature records were broken in more places than ever before.    All the way across Europe and the UK records are being shattered as wildfires wreak havoc upon the natural and the built environment.   China, India and the USA have also broken heat records and there is no let-up in sight.   (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/with-record-breaking-heat-europe-glimpses-its-climate-future/)   The environments in cities and towns are increasingly becoming hostile to human habitation and this will lead to more migration.       How has this come about?   We are living in the Anthropocene geological age  – the period in earth’s history when Man has made a significant impact on the environment.      It started (in earnest) at the time of the Indus...

Introduction – Macro context The COVID 19 pandemic will form a schism in the timeline of history.   History will be divided into the time before and the time after, the COVID19 Pandemic.    There have been comparable events in history (each with their own pre and post features ) – the First World War;   the Spanish Flu Pandemic of 1919;   the Great Depression of 1929;   the Second World War;   the Cold War and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008/9.     Regionally there have also been major events like 9/11 in NYC and the end of Apartheid in SA in 1994 – where-after life was never the same again, especially for Black South Africans.   In 1992 Francis Fukuyama suggested the end of history following the Cold War and the collapse of communism (Berlin Wall / Soviet Union) and its manifest failure.   The worldwide spread of liberal democracies and free-market capitalism and its lifestyle then signalled the end point of hum...

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...

According to McKinsey shareholder returns on telecom assets are down 60% over the last 4 years in the Middle East Africa (MEA) region. ( http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/telecommunications/our-insights : Telecommunications industry at Cliffs edge).     The main culprit is stagnating growth.   MEA includes mature markets like those in the Middle East where (mobile) penetration levels are close to 150% as well as high growth markets like Ethiopia where penetration is below 50%.    It is thus not useful to undertake analyses on an aggregate basis.   The mature markets are where data revenues are starting to show signs of rapid growth –but the markets are saturated.    In many African markets – particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa [1] – the decline in ARPU (average revenue per user) is no longer offset by subscriber growth and there is soon to be a decline in revenues and profitability. In order to profit from the explosion...

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...