Lagos — In various fora, African IT professionals show the latest trend in the industry. However, the peoples of these nations have not been able to make use of these new technologies. Frances Ovia who was at African Computing & Telecommunications (ACT) 2005 in Sandton, Johannesburg reports.

South Africa and Nigeria have come to be recognised as the ICT conference and seminar hot spots. South Africa first, then Nigeria, in that order. Ghana too has its fair share. And so are Tunisia and Egypt. New technologies are displayed in all these exhibitions and conferences. Yet they remain high there; unutilised by the people of Africa.

This year alone, South Africa had hosted more than five IT conferences. There was SatCom Africa early in the year. There was Highway Africa Conference, ACT 2005, and many more. In Nigeria, there were such industry meet as W.Afri.Tel, International Telecom Summit in Abuja, e-Nigeria, Africa Regional Preparatory Meeting and CTO. NICOMM is still ahead. Ghana also early in the year hosted a preparatory meeting of the WSIS. Tunisia would be host to the World Summit on Information Society in November.

In spite of all these, little tangible results has come out. At this year's African Computing and Telecommunications Summit for instance, there were lots of speeches and demonstration of what ought to be in Africa. Kai Wulff, the Managing Director, Kenya Data Networks (KDN) for instance spoke on Wi-Max recommending it as the next best thing. He concluded in his presentation however that "The future will prove if WiMAX could be the right step in something that is scalable enough to allow us to now do rural and urban on the same infrastructure with the different customer needs,"

Asif Kassam, Director of Operations, Skyband Corporation Limited based in Malawi also talked on using WiFi for trucking. He said it was the next generation Wireless Standard (WIMAX) as this is where Africa was going. He explained that it was easy to get Licensed Frequency Band. He foresaw a situation in that in the near future we will move from Hotspots to Hotzones. He added that WIMAX would always give a good range and may have a roaming capability which would need a future upgrade.

Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) also got generous mention. The technology VOIP, speakers after speaker noted, offers significant opportunity to reduce charges due to its innovation and competitiveness on the international market. VoIP, it was also said, has several merits over the circuit switched technologies. Although it was also generally agreed that there is the increased use of VoIP on the African continent, the technology however remains in the realm of a niche group of people.

The General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) was also intensely discussed. The technology which allows Internet access through the mobile phone is said to have greatly failed in sub-Saharan Africa. The failure has been occasioned by lack of sound marketing strategies by mobile phone operators in the vast region. While delivering a paper "New approach to successful marketing of GPRS, MMS and EDGE in Africa", Bill Herman, the managing director of a Botswana-based consultancy firm, Red Chillies Enterprises said that only three percent of total subscribers in the region use the GPRS technology.

He said that apart from GPRS, operators have failed as well to strategically market both the multimedia message service (MMS) and the Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution (EDGE). MMS allow subscribers to exchange multimedia messages through their mobile phones while EDGE technology combined with GPRS is capable of giving broadband speeds equivalent to 3G for data communication.

The low numbers in GPRS subscribers in the region make potential GSM operators shy away from investing in the technology, Herman said adding that the percentage of subscribers on GPRS is scaring - operators will not invest on the technology since it does not seem to make business sense.

He also pointed out that operators now run the risk of under utilization of their GPRS/EDGE/3G networks. He said that due to unsound marketing strategies, voice calls will remain the main source of revenue for mobile operators in the next 10 years.

At the same session, Wayne McDonald, the African Manager for Gilat Satellite South Africa noted that though Africa has the highest growth on subscriber base, they still cannot afford the costs of accessing data services through their mobile phone. "On the average, subscribers in the region have about US$5 to spend in a month, they will rather use this on voice calls not data services", said McDonald.

Same goes for mobile banking applications. Africans were regaled with talks of how a subscriber could transact almost any kind of business withing the confines of his room without steeping outside his gates, yet they have just been tales of happenings in other lands. Old habits die hard. Fear of security prevents the use of mobile applications. Issue of trust inhibit e-commerce.

These explain why Africa may yet be listening to more demonstration and watching more slide shows wthout real visible application of these technoogies in the next few years.