East African Business Week (Kampala)
Edris Kisambira
24 April 2006
Kampala — A new study by Uganda's telecommunications regulator has showed that 46% of Ugandans in the capital, Kampala and three major towns use the Internet.
The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) conducted what they called a simple survey around Kampala, Jinja, Mbale, Lira and Mbarara during the month of October 2005 to gauge Internet development in Uthe country.
"In terms of frequency of use of the Internet, analysed over on a monthly basis, 46% of the correspondents were daily users while 28% used the Internet once a month, 11% never use the Internet and 14% use it around once a month," the report reads in part.
The study shows that about 80% of those respondents that use the Internet do so at Internet cafés while 8% had home connections, 6.4% access the Internet from a friend's place and 5.7% use hotspot connections.
Results show that research ranks highest in respect to what those that access the Internet normally use it for followed by personal emails. However, when you look at it in terms of the categories of respondents, the highest percentage of individual respondents use it to access games while academic institutions have found it the biggest contributor to research activities.
Internet café operators use the Internet mainly to obtain updates while Information and Communication Technology (ICT) firms send official mails mostly.
Government and Non Governmental Organisations (NGO's) use the Internet mainly for official mails. Among the Internet Access Providers that took part in the survey, equal priority was indicated for updates and trade in use of the Internet.
The results have also showed that there has been a shift in the trends of connectivity by Internet Service Provider (ISP). While a majority of connections are dial up, the number of those using leased line on copper and wireless has significantly grown.
Access speeds were also looked at and the results show that there is a lack of awareness about bandwidth. Of the respondents, the researchers talked to, 59% said they were satisfied with the speed they receive on their link.
The remaining 41% felt that the speed is slow while others raised cost issues saying it is expensive, not reliable, frequently breaks down and that the connections are poor.
Up to 63.7% of the people interviewed are not satisfied with what they are paying their service provider for their Internet connection. "Most of these feel it is expensive while others that are still not satisfied feel the cost does not match the services or the rates are different," the report, which was presented recently at an Internet governance meet reads in part.
It said the most common problem experienced with Internet Access Service is the loss of Internet connection. Other problems raised were that it becomes too slow; there are lots of junk messages; password problems and narrow bandwidth hindering transfer of large data files.
On the awareness levels of what a domain name means, the results obtained raise concern on the level of understanding on what a domain name is, with 70% of the respondents claiming they have a domain name.
Those that did not have a domain name said: the charges are high, they have not heard of it, they are not bothered to have one, compensation packages are unrealistic in case of problems, have use of a friend's domain name or have no one to maintain it.
The most commonly possessed type of domain name at a percentage of 61.4% of those that have domain names is the generic code. The factors that influence the choice of domain name include the most common being identity with the country, ease of registration and free acquisition and system administrator's advice.
"Most (22.4%) domain name owners acquired them through registration while others obtained theirs through the service provider," said the report. "78% didn't incur any delays or problems in acquiring their domain names. Most of those who incurred problems felt the procedure is long. 13.5% say they have problems maintaining their domain names. They say the email can be closed anytime and others say it takes long to open." Most interviewees mistook email addresses for domain names according to the summary of findings.
Of the people who were interviewed, only 25.2% of the respondents have websites with a majority of them hosted in United Kingdom (UK).
Talking about the difference the Internet means to those who were interviewed, 97.7% of the respondents felt using the Internet has brought them achievements.
Respondents said the Internet is: easy, cheap and timely to communicate, especially abroad; used for research; got more friends; it is a source of information and knowledge, access to news all over the world; business use; employment service; success at job; got in touch with donors and while others use it as a source of income.
Internet applications and services respondents would like to see the following introduced in Uganda the following: video charting; Internet calls; accessible Internet; wireless internet services; shopping on the net and accessing internet through mobile phone.
Others are hotspots; online banking; getting services without subscriptions; high speed data connections; e-learning; WIMAX; use of local languages; Radios; local TVs; Free web based short message services (sms), online medical consultations and fibre optics (the list is in order of popularity).
The problems cited by all respondents in using or trying to use Internet in Uganda are: services are slow; Internet is expensive; has limited accessibility; unreliable connections; pornography; it is not well spread throughout the country. Others are computer viruses; no privacy; it at times fails to open; there are few Internet services; no problem; the villages have no Internet; some websites are restricted; the services are affected by weather and not everything is found in the Internet.
In general terms, the results show that awareness on various aspects of Internet like bandwidth and domain name is still very low and the findings give some insight into problems that need to be addressed in the area of Internet such as awareness, accessibility and content.
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