Okoh Aihe
6 August 2008
opinion
APART from poverty which ruins the life of the ordinary African, Bandwith is one essential commodity the continent lacks. It is accountable for most of the woes with communications which only very few countries have been able to address partially.
Dearth of bandwith is accountable for high telecom rates, it is accountable for low internet penetration and very responsible for the prohibitive cost of the minuscule service that is available. Most African countries run around, sometimes, in circles in search of where to purchase bandwith across the globe.
Fortunately Glo Gateway's Charles Odiase brings across a very strong voice of the efforts Glo is making through the Gateway and other services to come to the aid of the continent, not only to become a Tier One carrier of Traffic but also actually to make services and capacity available to the various countries, to prove that an African organisation can provide such elite services and in the process, force down prices. Here Odiase paints a radiant picture of the Glo Gateway efforts.
We want to talk to you about Glo Gateway which is the international arm of Globacom business You know we launched our operation about the same time with Glo Mobile. All the issues that have to do with international calls, roaming, inbound and outbound roaming and all the issues that have to do with international experience of subscribers from Nigeria and within Nigeria have to do with Glo Gateway. Recognising first of all that we have a bouquet of licence, we have a national carrier license that we have used over time to make a difference in the market place.
The idea really is that as a network that has all the licenses like the national carrier licence that enables us to roll out the fixed network, we have the Gateway licence for international calls, the Mobile license and of course the Online license.
Since then the Glo Gateway has started doing quite a lot; we are responsible for all the international operations of the business, and today if arguably, the largest carrier of voice and data in Africa and the first operator in West Africa to launch gateway switches and direct infrastructure in UK and in the US. The facilities enable us to aggregate international minutes, not only coming out of Nigeria but coming from different parts of the world to Nigeria in the first instance and also from different parts of the world we aggregate minutes to different A to Z destinations parts of the world as well. Which means that we are involved in hobbing related activities.
We could pick minutes from America and send to China without having to bring it to Nigeria first because our switches are there. Because we are connected to tier one and tier two carriers worldwide, it gives us an advantage, first of all, and they come to respect us as the carrier of choice in Africa. So they talk to us all the time, any time they want to talk to any company in Africa; they call us and say, do you have access to this network in Africa, we say yes, and they say lets give you all our traffic going to those places because we don't really know most of those networks in those countries. At least we can trust you because we have been doing business with you.
What has now happened is that at least up to 95 per cent of PTOs in Nigeria have their termination and origination minutes handled by the Glo Gateway. In other ways for them to have quality international call coming into their network, they need to have Glo gateway to help them do that.
The reason being that we have so many roaming partners. The idea behind this is to enable our customers who are carrying our SIM cards to have that wonderful experience, no matter where they are, to be able to first of all, receive call, two, go on the side of SMS. For this reason, we went ahead to change our international SMS gateway, upgraded the international gateway carrier in a way that our subscribers can send SMS from over 700 destinations of the world from the Glo network.
We tied up with several of the biggest networks in the world. We have products in the area of voice roaming, we have GPRS roaming ,we have international SMS, we have international MMS that we are about to launch. We have actually tested to over 100 destinations already on the international MMS site. But we are just taking our time to launch it so that people understand properly before we come to that point it's very clear that this what we want to achieve.
Let me tell you one of the advantages of what we have done. On international SMS, the service allows our subscribers to receive and send SMS to over 700 networks across all continents, including CDMA. This service was available to limited companies but has now been repackaged to cover the entire world. Subscribers would have the opportunity to communicate to their loved ones from all parts of the world without having any restriction whatsoever. The target has always been the youth market; most active telecom companies that belong to the talk and text segment of the market.
Are you saying it is only Globacom that can cover this kind of services you are mentioning, what about NITEL, is it not contributing to the development of the gateway services in Nigeria Exactly, if I may just say, NITEL in playing its role as a gateway, because of the government participation in it and the numerous problems that it has to face, both in the recent and distant past, the management has not been able to manage the gateway service properly. The infrastructure they even are maintaining on behalf of Nigeria for instance, the SAT3, the SAT3 managed out of Nigeria is the worst management. The situation has degenerated to a level where networks in Nigeria are taking SAT3 connectivity from a different country.
The government did not allow Globacom to manage SAT3, only NITEL has the exclusive right. It is either fibre cut today or there is fire in one Nitel facility or the other, or when NEPA goes off, it takes probably one or two hours before a generator is switched on. They don't manage the power situation well, so people lose a lot of talk time.
Internationally, NITEL would have been well recognised but because one, they are not picking their bills, two, they are not maintaining their links properly, three, there was a lot of fraud on their side, a lot of international players do not even want to talk to them at all.
If they want to terminate on Nitel at all, they want to terminate because they know Nitel was owing them money, so even the call doesn't get terminated, they just throw the call at them, but then, it doesn't get delivered. So today, minimum 95% of the PTOs rely on Glo Gateway to carry their international calls and that gives their customers experience of being able to make international calls because they are riding on the backbone that Glo Gateway has put in place.
You mentioned tier one and tier two carriers, what are they?
These are major carriers in the western world mostly. These carriers carry on the business of termination and origination of minutes to different networks across the world. Some of them are network operators on their own, for instance networks like AT&T, British Telecom, France Telecom, Telecom Italia and others. Of course there are a lot who are not operators but are big in the area of carrier business, like IBT, Mednet and others. Now what happens is that they have the right to interconnect with any network they want and they also have the right to shut down any network if they don't feel that minutes will terminate on their network. So today if you want to talk to India, we have connectivity to BSML, Reliance of India, ETEL, BARTI and others.
If you want to make the cheapest call to India, China and any of these places, you have to talk to Glo Gateway. If you do not have connection to these people, a lot of the time, the quality of call that will come to your network, one, you may not be able to manage it, in the sense that today, people make a lot of internet call, they are linked on VoIP, which quality are mostly poor, but because they do not intend to pay anybody they log on the VoIP and terminate whatever quality of call on anybody's network. However, because we are managing a lot of that on the infrastructure of Glo Gateway, people are able to originate and terminate good, quality calls to different parts of the world. Today, CELL relies on us to do a lot of business for them, because having made us their telecom partners in Nigeria, they found out that a lot of areas they used to spend a lot of resources, we could help them deal with it.
Today we have about 312 connections. When I say connections, I am talking about roaming agreement in 145 countries worldwide. This footprint is second to none in Africa. Now that places us in a unique advantage that what ever new value added service we need to bring to the market, the experience of the customer is always second to none. For instance, the Blackberry, we are the first to launch it here. If we had stopped at that, that is at the Glo mobile level, the experience would have been limited. But today the Blackberry users from Glo, has the opportunity of roaming to at least in 76 networks and that,
nobody has done half in Nigeria.
The idea really for us is that ultimately, Nigeria must come to the point where they fully understand that Glo Gateway means the best for them either when travelling or any form of experience they need to have.
Today we are also looking at opening Gateway switches in Hong Kong.It's just the same way we are talking of the Glo1 Submarine Cabling Project which today, is planning to address all the capacity issues that have to do with bandwidth, broadband access and all of that for the whole of Africa. What I mean is that we are running a cable under the sea from London to Lagos solely sponsored by Globacom. A project that is at the end of the day, likely to cost up to $500 million. We are doing this to link most of the west African coastal countries to the rest of the world with enough capacity. This raises the question of NITEL's capacity.
For us, NITEL could have done well, but you find out that area of capacity is not available today. Our banks are spreading all over most of the West African countries to the whole of Africa but the data they want to transmit they are not getting it at a good rate. They also don't want to spend too much more on communicating with their back office and all of that. It also means that many countries are looking for capacities to be able to manage many things in their own economy but they are not finding those bandwidth because nobody thought of bringing those huge investments, until Glo showed up again.
Already as we speak, we are half way done. The cable has been layed from London up to Mauritania and before the middle of next year, that cable would be live and completely up and running and then can be used by everybody in Africa to carry bandwidth, carry data across any network, which means that any form of video streaming or conferencing that people want to achieve for any reason whatsoever, they are able to do it without limitations.
Subscribe to Glo?
When you say subscribe to Glo, I'm saying on the area of gateway services. If you look at it this way, the other GSM companies by law are free to carry their own international traffic to any part of the world, much as the same with the PTOs. But the cost of establishing infrastructure is pretty high for them and they look at it and say, why do we have to do this if we have a gateway locally in Nigeria that can deliver this for us to different parts of the world?
They have also looked at the footprint that we have. For instance, if you were a subscriber of another network, you know for instance that Glo has footprint in the area of GPRS roaming,
prepaid roaming. We did all these because we know that if you take your SIM cards, it will cost you a lot much more to make calls. Now we are planning some form of reduction because as a gateway, we are in all countries and we are looking at the customers that we have and said look, we need our people to enjoy this services rather than cutting their arms and legs.
Today, we are going ahead to launch Globacom recharge cards in UK. So when our people go to London and run out of credit, they just go to the shop nearby and buy a Globacom Card and recharge immediately without any problem. All that is part of a way to give everybody the same experience they never had from others.
When is the recharge card launch taking effect?It is going to be launched this August. The UK government has given approval. The cards are already being printed in the UK and all of the issues are being tidied up. The staff that are going to launch it have already gone, they are in the UK now. We are putting finishing touches to the whole process and in August we will definitely go live.
Those recharge cards would enable Nigerians do two things, one, if you were roaming with your Sim card to UK, you can easily buy a recharge card when you run out of credit and, two, is that we are also thinking of Nigerians back home, brothers and sisters in school who don't have money to recharge their phones. Their relatives in UK can buy the recharge card over there, and send the recharge number to his relatives at home. That one is immediately able to benefit from that cash investment. We are going to replicate this in France and USA very soon. In fact,
if you look at the history of Globacom, the people who put us in this pedestal today are the masses. They believe in us so much and that is why everything we are doing is only to think of them.
We have made all our footprints available to them that immediately you land in France or in all the places we have roaming agreement, immediately you switch on your phone, you should be able to automatically get all the information you require to use your phone there. Direct you to emergency numbers and all that. And if you make a wrong call, with a wrong code, it should be able to automatically correct that and send the call for you.With 95 per cent of the PTOs hooked to you, you are likely becoming a monopoly?
The way the whole processing of licensing was done, we were the second national operator. We got the license to that effect. Later, the angle of Unified Licensing came into place. Well anybody would want to build a gateway, on his own but some of them tried it and found out it was not that easy, they bounced back to having us take up their traffic.
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