ICTworks by Inveneo

The greatest financial hurdles to open a computer cybercafe in Africa have been Line 1 on the Capex – Computers, and Line 1 on the Opex - Internet Access. Africa has the highest fees for Internet access in the world. What a lousy business - great demand, but expensive machines and expensive Internet in rural areas that are hard to service.

Mobile phones and mobile data at first seems a great competition to the Internet cafe. Both have low Capex, low Opex, and easy to service.

The rural Cybercafe owner is crying - "When do I get the cheap rates!" The Mobile companies are starving the Internet cafe. They don't offer cheap broadband off the backs of their connections. In the towns I've been visiting, I can get GPRS/Edge connections on my phone, I can see the backhaul is often highly contended satellite, sometimes fibre, but the mobile carrier isn't in the business of offering me a broadband connection to a home or to the Internet cafe. That is going to cannibalize his mobile data business.

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Value Added Services

So what to do? Value Add! All successful businesses change. Nokia started as a tree company!

I am John Hawker I can only tell you my experience with Sat-ed which developed and made this model for rural areas. You need to be more than just an cybercafe. You need to value add and grow with your customers. They're gaining in sophistication. This months model mobile phone is not enough, so be there waiting for that moment. Grow with them. They'll want more. As more phones join the network, their experience is going to fail.

We never took our test concept past 4 commercial “Internet” sites, but it worked for over 5 years, each site was financially viable within weeks and made much more than an Internet site, yet had the same staff and similar costs. What we did was offer a wide range of ICT services, always as low cost as possible as our areas were poor. Each site had 2 rooms, one for PC's, one for other “things.” Our site offered many things that being home alone with a mobile can't offer.

Local Trainers and Employees

We'd find teachers in the villages we worked in, identified who had good reputations and wanted to work as after school tuition in different subjects. That gave us a small margin, and a good reputation.

We'd run classes teaching kids how to use computers safely; parents liked that and felt safe. We repaired computers belonging to others, so that we created an environment that made people want to buy computers. The site manager/owner was a local trained to repair.

Be sure you add a cybercafe control system like "CafeCup" or any other system. This stops people messing with your system. You'll save yourself thousands for a $50 investment or a free system.

Scanning and Photcoyping

We added scanning which everyone does, and found old binding presses, very cheap, kids love them, and for a few extra cents it means their school project looks much better, you sell the plastic folder that goes with it at a mark up. So that over time the shop can evolve as well. Anyone running an Internet Cafe becomes over time adept at computer repair, we trained someone in the village.

We found a cheap old photocopier, copying is a great business, always in demand. Old photocopier also meant older people came in, something they don't do if it's computers only, and they stop and chat and loose some fear of PC's.

Digital Cameras & Fax Machine

Oddly with digital cameras we found that printing out photos at our last shop, and at the site of where we want to open in Ghana, the demand is huge. Fax machines are always in demand and the mark up is huge. Many businesses need a fax, not email, must be a fax and are willing to pay. Our fax machine was one of our best income sources.

Now an Internet cafe is the last place to rent books, but it's full of kids, and there are no libraries in our areas, so we'd buy books and comics at second hand markets, then but them in our shelves, and rent them out. Along with school stationary, paper pens, rubbers, rulers. All the things kids needs.

Extend Your Reach

There will be ways to connect your site, Satellite guys are hurting, so find some other cybercafés and buy in bulk, be there waiting, change your game.

And most importantly, add a WiFi system, extend the reach of your Cyber Cafe! Your cafe doesn't end with the walls! Buy a cheap buy good system like Ubiquiti and you'll find the mobile data users switching to you if you can get a good backhaul. The more customers you get, the better a broadband deal you can negotiate.

Don't worry too much about licensing. Look to offer it to schools, enabling you to buy more bandwidth cheaper, and your then exempt from expensive licenses.

Eventually you'll be a broadband supplier. It's how big companies start.

Our Impact

OK – and how much more profit did we make than a regular Internet cafe? Over 50% more profit. That's significant. 50% more than a normal cybercafe.

Demand is coming, along with a list of needs such a good e-education booths, all sorts of opportunities. Cybercafes will there to offer it.

A few years ago, Internet access in Africa was crazy expensive. Entire projects would sink under the weight of a monthly broadband bill, often exceeding staff salaries to be the single largest expense in an ICT intervention.

Fast forward to 2010 and the ITU says that broadband Internet access prices are dropping by more than 50% globally with a special bonus for African countries:

The regional price trends highlight that while ICT prices are falling in all regions of the world, the greatest price drops occurred in Africa, where fixed broadband prices fell by over 55% and mobile cellular prices by 25%.

Despite this encouraging trend, Africa continues to stand out for its relatively high prices. Fixed broadband Internet access in particular remains prohibitively high, and, across the region as a whole, still represented almost three times the monthly average per capita income. Only one out of ten people in Africa is using the Internet.

Before you let that second paragraph depress you, realize that the ITU may need to update the way it records Internet access when mobile data subscriptions account for 99 percent of all Internet access in Kenya and mobile phones are killing the cybercafé business model.

It may be that Internet penetration is actually higher than 10% now that all that African fiber is being used by mobile subscribers vs. fixed line users. After all, Facebook usage in Africa doubled in a month in 2011, with half of its users globally accessing their favorite social network via a mobile device, not a traditional computer.

I am David Scanell and I would like to describe the Internet access landscape in Kisumu and Nyanza from my personal experience. Now this just Western Kenya, so I can't comment on the rest of rural Kenya, though I imagine it's pretty similar.

There are a few terrestrial and wireless ISPs in Kisumu - KDN, Africaonline, Orange Telkom and Swift Global spring to mind. I think a few more may arrive soon once the fibre optic cable installation marathon that's currently under way here is finished.

Right now, I know a couple of people using Orange ADSL and a few others using KDN's WIMAX. I only know a single person (through their business) using fibre but I think quite a few more homes and business may switch to fibre soon; maybe even more will move to wireless services from resellers. I'm pretty sure that far more people will start use mobile data over the same time frame though - coverage in Kenya is very good and the spread of mobile ownership continues apace - and there are a few drivers for mobile growth that are no where near exhausted yet.

Since I last lived here in 2007, there has been a noticeable influx of new, cheaper low- to mid-range phones to the market. Whereas before I saw high street shops full of second hand phones, today I see quite a lot more selling good looking branded phones from China such as Tecno - which has a broad range available here - as well as a Huawei and ZTE who also have a few products. There's also a pretty high volume of KIRF stuff for sale here too. Lots of weird and wonderfully specced Noklas, Samesungs and the like.

Huawei's IDEOS (android) phone has had a huge media push here of late, though it is still way, way out of the average person's reach though at it's current KSH7,999 price point. The Samsung brand seems to be going from strength to strength here and, as ever, Nokia has a big (though noticeably falling) high street presence.

Nearly all these companies offer mid level phones that have EDGE capability at least - some of them also have 3G (the cheapest one in Safaricom's shop right now is KSH3,999). High level stuff is available here too - PhoneExpress have my Desire Z on sale - but the prices are as high as you'd expect with, for example, a Samsung Galaxy S (i9000) setting you back KSH42,999.

For a mobile 3G modem, prices range from KSH1,999 for the Huawei E173 to KSH12,199 for the Huawei E5 (which is a portable wifi hotspot) and most come with a bundle of free data.

As for mobile data coverage and pricing, there may not be much 3G outside of major towns just now, but EDGE seems to be almost everywhere else, at least in the parts of Nyanza, Western, Central and Coast I've traveled to in the last 9 months (including some very out of the way places around Lake Victoria here).

The end user cost is relatively low - standard unbundled MB price on Safaricom is currently KSH8 - and the bundled prices seem to be dropping all the time. The main players Safaricom, Orange and Airtel are cooking up new, lower-priced data bundles. There's currently a new set of bundles being marketed by Safaricom as "affordable Internet for less". These daily bundles are priced from 5MB for KSH5 up to 25MB for KSH20.

I'd say the number of Kenyan's going online via mobile will continue to increase rapidly for a good while yet.

I am Michael Benedict and while working with SMS-based applications I’ve noticed an air of mystery around the issue of reliability. I hear colleagues say ambiguous things like “carriers consider SMS to be lower priority than voice”, or “SMS delivery isn’t guaranteed”.

My personal experience has been that messages are almost always delivered quickly and correctly, but I’ve heard stories of hours-long delays, corrupt data, and occasionally messages that never arrive. Since I am working on two projects that depend on reliable SMS service — one involves field-based data collection and another employs SMS as a transport layer between computers — I’m curious about how factors such as network, location, and time of day impact message transmission.

I found myself in Mwanza, Tanzania last week with two GPRS modems and a local partner who was unenthusiastic about the work I was actually there to do, so I tried a little experiment. I bought SIM cards and airtime for three of the major TZ networks, put two at a time in the modems, and wrote a simple python script using Adam Mckaig’s excellent pygsm library.

The script sent messages in all permutations at an arbitrarily chosen interval of about 20 minutes. This means that four messages were sent at a time: each SIM to itself and to the other SIM, repeated about every 20 minutes for periods of up to 27 hours. Outgoing messages noted the origin and destination networks, send time, and a sequential message number to make it easier to spot lost messages. Incoming SMS were stamped with the time received, and the delay in seconds between sending and delivery. Messages were sent two seconds apart to reduce errors from the modems trying to send and receive at the same time, and results were recorded in a CSV file.

a) Airtel and Zantel

Zantel is one of the smaller networks in TZ, but I was having technical problems with my Tigo SIM so started with Zantel and Airtel. Airtel was known as Zain until recently when Zain was acquired by Baharti Airtel, based in India. The script ran from about 1AM on January 14 to just before 5AM on January 15. Here are the results:

Delivery times and dropped messages between Airtel and Zantel Tanzania. Click to see scale. Note that the Airtel modem stopped sending and receiving at about 7AM on Jan 15, and the script hung until I woke up shortly after 8 and reset the modem. I do not know what caused the problem.

331 messages were sent and 10 (3%) were dropped. Delivery times fell into three bands. Airtel-Airtel (i.e. the Airtel SIM sending to itself) was easily the fastest, with messages typically delivered in 6 or 7 seconds. Messages in either direction between Airtel and Zantel took roughly twice as long, typically between 13 and 16 seconds. One outlier, an Airtel to Zantel message sent between 2 and 3 AM on Jan 15, took 24 seconds to arrive, and the only dropped Airtel-Airtel message occurred around the same time. Delivery times for Zantel-Zantel messages were split unevenly: one cluster near 6 seconds, another around 15 seconds, and a third around 32 seconds. 9 messages sent from Zantel-Airtel were not received.

Some aspects of this plot seem reasonable. Airtel is a larger company with wider network coverage, so it’s not too far fetched to imagine that messages sent from an Airtel SIM to itself would be the fastest to arrive. By that reasoning I’d expect messages sent between the two networks to take somewhat longer, and they do. The Zantel-Zantel delivery times are less intuitive. I don’t know what would account for the three distinct time ranges for delivery. It is also unexpected to see that 9 Zantel-Airtel messages were never delivered but no Airtel-Zantel messages experienced this problem.

b) Airtel and Tigo

SMS delivery times between Airtel and Tigo SIMs on January 14, 2011. Click image to see scale. *Messages marked unreadable appear to have reached the modems but could not be read, and resulted in an (unfortunately unlogged) exception in pygsm.

192 messages were sent and 3 (1.6%) were not readable by the modem. Four distinct delivery time ranges emerged. I eliminated one outlier from the plot to make it easier to view: on January 15 at 11:47, a Tigo-Airtel message took 129 seconds to arrive. I believe that the 3 unreadable Tigo-Tigo messages reached the modem, but the script raised an exception and the messages were not read. Unfortunately I was not logging pygsm’s debugging output so I am marking the missing messages as “unreadable” instead of dropped. I will have to log output in future runs and see if I can reproduce the problem. I didn’t expect Tigo-Airtel messages to arrive slower than Airtel-Tigo. The difference is small but it would be interesting to know why it’s there.

c) Two Tigo SIMs.

The purpose of having the modems send messages to themselves in the previous two runs was to test delivery times within a network. It occurred to me that sending from a SIM to itself may not be equivalent to sending between two different SIMs on the same network, so I bought a second Tigo SIM:

SMS delivery times between two Tigo SIMs. Click to scale.

164 messages were sent and 1 (0.6%) was not received. The data shown excludes one outlier: the first Tigo A-Tigo B message took 457 seconds to arrive. So: is SIM to SIM within a network equivalent to sending from a SIM to itself? Sometimes. I don’t know why it varies, but note that the number for Tigo A is +255716379091 while Tigo B is +255717435798.

In particular, after the 255 country code the numbers have different prefixes, 716 for A and 717 for B. Typically Tanzanian SIMs on the same network have the same first 3 digits, and the difference here may indicate that Tigo’s servers treat the two numbers differently. The Airtel/Tigo data above used the SIM that is labeled as “Tigo B” here.

Thoughts and next steps

Unexpected patterns emerged, including asymmetric delivery times between networks, that I would like to understand better. The few dropped messages do not seem to follow a clear pattern, which is a concern for both human and computer-focused SMS applications where missing messages can cause confusion and frustration.

It seems possible that having the modems send all 4 messages with only a 2 second delay between sending could be impacting the results. It would be interesting to revise the script to randomly offset the message send times by a few minutes and see if that increases reliability.

This is not a scientific experiment since there are variables such as time of day, day of the week, network traffic, modem location, weather, and likely many others that are not being controlled for. Still I think the data gives a representative snapshot of network performance. Overall SMS delivery was quite good. With the exception of a few of outliers most messages were delivered in under a minute, and Airtel consistently delivered on-network SMS in less than 10 seconds.

Occasional dropped messages show that safeguards need to be in place if SMS is used for critical applications. Some preliminary timing data I took in Uganda suggests that the networks there are not nearly as reliable. I’m looking forward to looking more carefully at Ugandan networks when I’m back.

If you like this sort of thing and also have too many modems and not enough social life, feel free to try out the script yourself. I’d be interested to see what the results look like in other countries.

A special thanks to Henry Corrigan-Gibbs and Matt Berg for interesting discussions about the timing script and SMS reliability.

This was posted first as SMSpecially Reliable? Part 1 and is repulblished here with permission

We all know that developing countries have seen rapid growth in information and communication technology (ICT) access and use - from basic Internet access to the explosive growth of mobile phone ownership - and this growth is uneven. While the hype points to mobile phone saturation, high-speed Internet access and broadband connectivity is still limited and poorly used by business and government to create and deliver key services.

The World Bank Group had the strategy to promote ICT access and adoption across all sectors of the developing world through:

1. ICT sector reform,
2. access to information infrastructure,
3. ICT skills development, and
4. ICT applications.

Recently, it's internal Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) completed an Evaluation of World Bank Group Activities in Information and Communication Technologies, a review of the $4.2 billion in World Bank support to the ICT section during fiscal 2003–10. During that time, the Bank Group was the largest multilateral financier in telecommunications in Africa. (Yet that was about 1 percent of private investment in telecommunications of $400 billion between 2003 and 2009.)

The IEG's findings are quite impressive - in it's transparency and its recommendations - on the Bank's ICT expansion activities:

Among these areas, the Bank Group’s most notable contributions have been in sector reforms and support to private investments for mobile telephony in difficult environments and in the poorest countries, where most of its activities have taken place. Countries with Bank Group support for policy reform and investments have increased competition and access faster than countries without such support. In other priority areas, the World Bank Group’s contribution has been limited. Targeted efforts to increase access beyond what was commercially viable have been largely unsuccessful.

In general, the Bank has a 60% success rate across the four strategies, with one major exception:

Regarding efforts to promote universal access, targeted World Bank ICT projects with the objective to directly promote target access for the underserved and the poor had limited success; only 30 percent have achieved their objectives of implementing universal access policies or increasing ICT access for the poor or underserved areas. Bank operations to promote universal access often were slow to get off the ground and were superseded by the rollout of mobile phone networks by the private sector, in some cases supported by Bank sector reform

Congratulations to the World Bank!

I am sure there will be many people who see that 40-70% failure rate in ICT projects and ask why the Bank is doing such a bad job. Expect the calls for reduction in ICT investments to start soon after. Both are misguided. Rather than bemoaning the failure rate, let us congratulate the World Bank on such transparency and risk taking.

First, it takes great bravery to critically examine any project, and even more so when donor country funds are at stake. It is even harder to be honest that many projects fail, and harder still to make those failures public. On Monday, we asked, "How Do We Break Oscar Night Syndrome in ICT4D M&E?," and I am quite impressed that the Bank did just that even when the results were seemingly so unflattering.

Next, let us be realistic about where the World Bank is often working. It is supporting programs in relatively challenging environments, even market failure situations, where there is minimal private sector investment and considerable resistance to reform. What do you expect the success rate to be in situations like that? I would consider 30% to be a remarkable success rate. It's better than the 20% success rate of Silicon Valley start-ups who are coddled by the most business-conducive environment in the world.

So let us not be critical, let us actually be ecstatic that the World Bank is brave enough to invest where others fear to tread and is honest about it's success in doing so. In this case, may we all be more like the Bank.