by Amanda L. Kazdoy

Satellite industry experts tend to agree that Africa is in dire need of basic telecommunications services, particularly in rural communities. As developing regions are becoming more technologically advanced, companies all over the world are making plans for Africa and its full integration into the wired and wireless worlds.

At a recent gathering at the Worldspace headquarters, FCC Chairman William Kennard, who just returned from a trip to Africa and is supporting the effort to bring the continent up to speed technologically, said, "It’s not just to get the next generation of Internet service up, it’s actually to get basic telephone service; the urgency is to address basic telecommunications needs."

Officials at Hughes Network Systems (HNS) agree. Ramesh Ramaswamy, director of marketing for Africa and the Middle East, says Africa is experiencing an initial growth spurt in satellite communications, because satellite service in general reached Africa much later than developed regions.

"The Africa region has probably seen the greatest growth in satellite communications in terms of percentage growth over the last three to four years," Ramaswamy says. "If you look at where it was three and a half years ago versus where it is today, the growth is probably one of the highest."

And he says for the future, telephony and data services will become more prevalent because major corporations are positioning themselves to target that market with new products and services.

HNS is currently providing African service providers with VSAT equipment; data, mesh and telephony products; and as wireless local loops, among others. Since HNS is not able to set up an individual hub in Africa, for regulatory reasons, the company has made strategic partnerships with service providers in Africa to help them in various ways with the equipment, such as implementation, marketing and financing.

"We offer our expertise in the service area to these service providers, so that means we become their strategic partner."

Ramaswamy adds that since African companies are small, the drivers in the market are government mandates. So most of the applications for satellite communications in Africa will include health services and education.

Noah Samara, CEO and chairman of Worldspace, the first company to deliver direct-to-home radio services to Africa, believes Africa is suffering from information scarcity. He says in order to build a continent with adequate information resources, you must have many components, including cable pipelines, satellite communications and telephony to create a stable information infrastructure.

"If you want to develop a home, a neighborhood, a city, a country, a continent, the most important thing is information about technology, about processes, about organization," he says.

Samara says Worldspace responded to this scarcity by conducting extensive research on the market, and then responding to its needs. "We put together the infrastructure and tailored it from the ground up based on market need," he says.

Earlier this year, Worldspace’s first satellite, Afristar, which was launched in 1998, was having problems with its solar panels. According to Gene Reich, Worldspace’s director of internal and editorial communications, the panels showed an unexpected drop in power. "We’ve been watching the situation very closely, and we will be much clearer of the status [of the satellite] in the next month."

Despite these problems, Worldspace began a regular schedule of broadcasts on October 1, and officially launched its service later in October.

In addition to the radio service provided by Worldspace, the company plans to introduce a new multimedia product, called Worldscape, which will allow users to access the Internet. Samara believes that 10 years from now, Africa’s population will grow, as will the variety of information that will be available to Africans.

Favien Bachabi, Intelsat group director for Africa, also agrees that the fastest-growing services are telecommunications, and that teledensity is low and is something to explore. Intelsat has a considerable representation in Africa, according to Bachabi. He says the company currently has 43 out of 53 countries in Africa as members. But in one way or another, be it video, telephony, data transmission or Internet, all 53 countries are served by Intelsat.

In order to address the teledensity issue, Intelsat developed the DAMA (demand assignment multiple access) service whereby all countries may have direct connection with each other, he says. He adds that almost 70 percent of those living in rural areas do not have access to basic telephony.

"The concern is to bring telephony to those areas," he says. "Intelsat is developing a very cheap solution which is a combination of WLL (wireless local loop) and VSAT in response to the requirements of rural telephony." The project is called WLL/VSAT and is currently being pilot tested. The service is being implemented in Senegal and the African hub is in Gandol. In addition, two antennas were installed in two rural African villages, Kaffrine and Tivaounane. The antennas, he says, will connect each of those villages with two other small villages.

In the future, Bachabi believes use of the Internet will help speed up the implementation of telecommunications means in Africa, especially in the area of distance learning. "We are getting more and more requests from Africa to implement Internet for distance learning, and to get basic telephony in rural areas," he says. "Our growth will be in those areas: rural telephony, Internet and corporate networks."

Globalstar, a new global mobile telephony system, will also be targeting Africa, mainly in South Africa and most of the North African nations, including Morocco, Algeria and Egypt, according to Loral spokesman Mac Jeffery. "The South African gateway can also ‘reach’ into Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, though we are still working on lining up on-the-ground service providers there to handle marketing and also to line up necessary government approvals," he says.

Looking into the next millennium, Globalstar is hoping to install a gateway in Nairobi, which could cover Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania by late 2000. Western Africa is also a future target area.

Another key market for Globalstar is that of rural communities in developing countries, including Africa, among others. Although a terrestrial system seems to be the most practical solution, Jeffery says, installing a Globalstar system in those regions can be cheaper in the long run.

"The installation of a Globalstar fixed phone unit, for a few thousand dollars, can often be far less expensive than the cost of building out a terrestrial system to that village, particularly if difficult terrain is involved," he says. "And while the cost of an individual Globalstar call may be high for an individual in such a village, a number of governments have shown interest in subsidizing the cost of Globalstar service."

On the Loral satellite services side, South Africa and parts of northern Africa will be served by Loral’s Orion 2 satellite, scheduled to complete in-orbit testing in December as of presstime, providing mostly international connectivity to Internet service providers, Jeffery says.

ICG Satellite Services is currently serving five to 10 companies that are operating services in the African region, according to John Greene, ICG’s sales manager for the Western region. ICG makes partnerships with companies who are providing service there, and then ICG leases the bandwidth to those companies. "We’re providing international bandwidth to enable these calls to come back to the United States and be terminated anywhere in the world," Greene says.

Currently, ICG has made a deal with African Wireless, which is working with Nortel Networks and Gambia Cellular Network to provide cellular service to Gambia. "There’s a tremendous desire for telecommunications and some wealth and definite demand," he says. The same service has already been implemented in Kinchansa, in the Republic of Congo, as well as locations in Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. In the not-so-wealthy rural areas of Africa, ICG is making plans to partner with Titan Wireless to provide rural telephony in the future, Greene says.

Africa is well on its way to being more up to speed with the rest of the world, industry officials agree. They say that as telephony is integrated in rural areas, and much of Africa is equipped with more sophisticated technology, the Internet will be next in line to fully infiltrate the market.

Amanda Kazdoy is Via Satellite’s Assistant Managing Editor