IDC 2025 - Reporting of previous day sessions and discussions
6:53AM Jan 23, 2025
Speakers:
Gopal Tadepalli
Keywords:
Digital transformation
African digital strategy
Ethiopian digital strategy
regulatory frameworks
community networks
internet infrastructure
financial sector digitization
FinTech startups
internet resilience
regional integration
open fiber data standard
low Earth orbit solutions
power supply
educational technology.
little bit about the emerging trends. on the fast nrmsc,
apologies, I can't see half of my screen. Telecom engineering from and telecom engineering from graduate school of
telecommunication and information technology. Has two decades of work experience in telecommunication and information technology. His areas of expertise include fiber optic networks and Information System audit as part of as a part time consultant, he writes proceedings of local events and as such, served as a reporter in several high profile events, including the first Ethiopian internet forum. I would like to welcome to the stage to Give us
a summary of the last few days. You
Good morning once again. My name is Johann as faci Kaz introduced produced. I'm the reporter of this event. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to give you
highlight of the last two days of the event. The event was full of formative presentations and panel discussions.
Most of the all of the sessions are
recorded and are available online. So whatever is missed from my recaps you can watch online.
So let me proceed.
So one of the thematic areas covered
by the during the conference was digital strategies
we had. We had a panel discussion
that discussed the continental digital digital transformation strategy and the Ethiopian digital transformation strategy. The The first one was the the African digital strategy presented by Miss merat vodmas. So these are the action points she forwarded.
Some of them are
nations. Nations should increase investment in digital transformation. Also, she suggested harmonization and integration of regulatory frameworks, and she emphasized the need to invest on digital skills and encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship, and also enhanced collaboration among African countries.
The next was a presentation
by Doctor abiot bayo. It was about the Ethiopian digital transformation strategy. So these are the major highlights. One of the striking points mentioned by Dr abiot was that digital transformation strategies are not standalone strategies by themselves, they are more of a continuation of nations development strategies. So Ethiopia's major accomplishments regarding digital transformation include improvement of infrastructure, enacting legal and regulatory frameworks and facilitation of coordination among various institutions, as you can see, but there are a lot of challenge that still persist, including limited digital skills, access disparities Bucha classic huddles, which are mainly because of artificial problems and financial resource resource problems.
The ensuing question and answer session,
these points highlighted the need to build cross border infrastructure for the realization of the African Free Trade Area agreement, dealing with this attitudinal problems or bureaucratic issues,
addressing The device affordability issue,
digital skills development and monitoring of digital transformation strategies. So Miss Meret suggested that African nations must must be more cooperative in reporting their progresses regarding status in the implementation of the digital transformation strategy. So
another thematic area was regulation for
connecting the unconnected. It was one of the parallel sessions of the first day. So
the there are the presentations.
Was one of the presentations was regulation to connecting the unconnected in the ICANN region by Miss Mavis. As you can see,
internet penetration, broadband subscription
and rural connectivity in the ICANN region is very low. So
challenge faced in terms of infrastructure,
regulatory barriers and economic constraints. Focusing on the regulatory barriers, these are mainly on complex licensing issues, lack of policy harmonization and bureaucratic inefficiencies. So
in addressing these barriers,
the following were suggested, unified licensing framework for
simplified licensing procedures,
regulatory sand boxes to test new technologies and build regulatory capacity, technology neutrality and spectrum management for fair competition, infrastructure sharing among telecom operators, so that we can lower a lower cost of deploying new infrastructure, universal access and service taxes, universal access and service and tax incentives and multi sector regulation.
The uh to improve efficiency,
the other regulator really considerations suggested by the presentation, where public private partnerships, agile regulations and harmonization of original policies, and also other important considerations where internet exchange points to reduce cost of local internet traffic, to improve internet speed and reduce latency, community networks for localized solutions and adopting regulatory frameworks and strategies to manage spectrum. The other presentation was by the Deputy General Director of the Ethiopian communication authority, so he introduced the regulatory framework
in Ethiopia.
So the key highlights of the presentation were the introduction of the telecom liberalization in Ethiopia has enhanced expansion of telecom access
and the legal and this the legal and
regulatory frameworks of the telecommunication sector have direct correlation with the enhancement of connectivity in Ethiopia. And one of the interesting points is that telecom operators have coverage applications for voice text and very high speed broadband service.
And there is also a Universal Service Fund.
The source of these funds are levies and donations, and the money collected from the operators is distributed through reverse auction mechanisms.
However, there are still key
challenges to connectivity, including road accessibility, lack of power in rural areas and lack of digital literacy.
The other presentation in this thematic area was
regulation in Kenya, specifically on community networks in Kenya.
These are the key takeaways.
The only African countries that recognize community service provider community network service providers are Kenya, Uganda and Les eto. So in expanding these community networks, governments are the key catalysts.
The involvement of multiple stakeholders is
a key, key pillar. Investment in research and development is also
important, and the
decentralization of data centers this has has been emphasized to enhance last mile access.
The other interesting presentation was the
connecting the income connected in the Brazil. In the Brazil ISP Association, as you can see, the number of internet service providers in Brazil is astonishing. There are 21,000 internet service providers. Actually, all of them are not big ones, but there are 21,000 internet service providers, and these, most of them, are small operators. And these small operators are a big reason that Brazil is rapidly moving forward in the digital inclusion. So what enabled these small operators to flourish is the innovative regulatory model followed in Brazil, specifically the asymmetric, asymmetric regulation, meaning regulatory burdens are ISED for small operators than on the bigger ones
In the Question and Answer session
the following point. These points were discussed, establishing regional regulators, Association for uniformity and standardization, building internet exchange points, the trade off between promoting community networks and local ISPs, meaning the trade off between the commercial side of things and the social service side of things, infrastructure and local data centers and asymmetric regulations.
The other parallel session of the
first day was digitization of the financial sector in Ethiopia,
one of the presentations was digitization of
the financial sector. So these are the key takeaways. Ethiopia has made significant stripes in terms of digital financial sector. So one of the key points is collaboration between government financial institutions and fintechs is essential to tackle
challenge in the financial sector. Focus on accessibility is key, and
leveraging data analytics, data and analytics for better decision making will take the financial sector to next frontier. Another presentation was about FinTech startups and companies. As you can expect, internet plays a major role in FinTech startups,
however, FinTech, the FinTech industry
in Ethiopia, faces challenge including regulatory compliance, cyber security and customer trust. So the new financial technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrency offer fast and secure way to transfer value across borders.
Another point to emphasize here is the Ethiopian FinTech
landscape has a lot of startups in mobile money and payment remittance, lending and saving and payment processing fields, this is a great progress from the Ethiopian side. So key discussion points during the discussion was that Ethiopia can learn from countries like Nigeria that have 3.5 million liter machines and more than 200 FinTech companies.
So second day,
one of the thematic areas was internet infrastructure development. So the first presentation was the critical role of internet infrastructure in fostering connectivity. So connectivity is key to digital transformation. It enables key services.
So one of one of the key takeaways here
is building technical communities is critical to build infrastructure only building the infrastructure will not suffice.
Data Center Indian land fiber
footprints in IGAD region are low, so more work is needed in this regard. So uh,
another presentation was on career neutral
data centers across East Africa.
The African the the interesting point here is
the African land. The African data center landscape is still largely dominated by career carriers, Bay based data centers, so only 30% of the African commercial facilities are carried neutral so
there are a lot of challenge
in building career neutral data centers, including lack of reliable and renewable energy, lack of skilled labor, high customs and import duties, etc. However, there are opportunities. Also there are opportunities, including the proliferation of local content developers, the tendency to involve public and private partnership to develop new sources, new source of energy and to build infrastructure, and the revision of college syllabus to enable
to produce
digitally skilled manpower.
Other presentation was community network experience
in Kenya. It was continuation of presentation made in on the first day. So this is these are the key takeaways. Normally, one of the key challenges faced by community networks is lack of understanding of what these community networks are and also there are challenges in deploying deploying community networks, such as cost of equipment, operational cost inadequate power and cost of bandwidth. It was suggested that ISPs should support community network providers, through training and communities of practice, such as national DNS forum and local NGOs must be supported also for the continuation of for the sustainability of community networks.
Another, another key
presentation was on community centered connectivity by Dr Carlos Ray Monero. So
the COVID 19 pandemic has shown that there is a big
digital gap still expanding. So community centered connectivity is a key to close these gaps in digital divides, and this community centered community centered network providers are feasible alternative solutions because they can enter into areas that are not feasible to bigger telecom operators. So this community center connectivity connectivity providers can be in the form of community owned networks or public own networks, like metropolitan networks or privately own networks.
In the Question and Answer session,
the role of local companies in fostering connectivity, the benefits of IX piece in terms of sustainability of connection, quality and cost reduction were discussed, and the role of intelligent systems to manage power in data centers and the need to create awareness on data centers and cloud services were discussed.
Another thematic area of the conference was
internet resilience and regional integration.
So one of the first presentation regarding
this, this thematic area was the African network trains by Mr. Bah from meta.
So one of the
key points here is the sub Saharan Africa's share of connectivity to Europe is showing a declining trend. It can be because of price or availability issues.
However, intra Africa, connectivity is showing
an increasing trend.
Increasing competition is key to increase redundancy
and get more capacity and ensure cross border connectivity. The expansion of data centers, CDNs and exchange traffic relates to less dependency on Europe,
and it's evident that
career neutral data centers and cloud services are expanding in Africa. The other presentation was about lessons learned from the 2024 cable cuts and internet resilience in the western East African regions. So in the what are the lessons learned from the West African outages? Countries that had redundant networks were largely unaffected by the big outage and the cross border terrestrial fiber links were used to resume to reroute the traffic to the redundant routes. So this shows the importance of cross border, Terri steal links. Another key points are the importance of redundancy, having local content and services to improve availability of services, and another key point highlighted is building human networks as key
is equally as important as building infrastructure bring outage, we should be able to
to to know who to call to how To get the the outage fixed.
The other thematic area was
bridging Africa's connectivity to the next level.
So one of the presentations was in the
introduction of open fiber data standard. So the concept here is that the undersea cable, the network map is publicly available. However, Terri steal connections with the nations. Their data is not readily available. So this open fiber data standard
is used to record this data, and it
benefits governments for effective investments, improved coordination across infrastructure sectors and reduction of physical network interruptions and distractions.
So regulators must convince
operators about the big picture of or the benefits of this infrastructure information, and they must adapt this open data standard.
Another presentation was about satellites filling
the connectivity gap.
Satellites, are good alternatives, normally,
okay, the only the only problems here are the user terminal cost is high, but the connectivity cost is low, so
balances can be made, but the same
can be okay.
It can be taken as alternatives. So
what's the concern regarding this? Leo satellite is their five the their five year life span.
Their life their
the five year life span is a concern for long term sustainability, and there is the issue of space debris.
So other than that,
satellites so the main point is satellites offer alternatives for filling the connectivity gap.
Another presentation was on measuring the
the internet of the ICANN region. So this cloud fair, rather, it can,
can measure, it can make multi faceted,
faceted measurement of internet connectivity, including internet traffic, connectivity, quality, outage and routing. So all stakeholders in the industry should make use of this tool and analyze what's in their network and understand their connectivity status.
Last but not least, of the
today's thematic areas was internet in education in Ethiopia,
the first presentation was on
digitizing primary and secondary schools.
So digitizing in schools
has a lot of impacts on students. Some of these impacts are it enables students to understand abstract concepts through simulations. It improves their language proficiency, and it can help them catch up with missed classes, especially for girls without teacher support. For teachers,
it enhances their content, knowledge and
pedagogy, pedagogical skills.
But it's it's important to address
challenge related to power supply and device affordability.
As a presentation was Ethiopian strategy to
use internet to improve education. This, this presentation mainly covered Ministry of Education's directions in involving digital technology to enhance education so the Ethiopian educational sector, there are several institutional voids, but It's thought that air tech can can fill this institutional voice.
However, this Ed Tech has
its own challenge as well, including unequal access digital skills and literacy gaps and data standards and quality.
There is a digital education strategy in Ethiopia, a
digital education strategy implementation plan, and
its strategic focuses include
enabling infrastructure and connectivity, data governance and analytics platforms and curriculum aligned digital content.
Another presentation
was on improving Ethiopian education through technology.
A key point here is
we cannot. We cannot wait to build one part of the digital technology and leave the others. So all things must be All components must be built in parallel, the skills, the content, the infrastructure, they must be built in parallel, the importance of localized educational content was emphasized. It's also crucial to consider offline alternatives so that students can have access to media, to the digital content, while connectivity issues are dealt with. So twist, the use of technology in education will increase student engagement and performance, improve teacher sufficiency through Streamlined tools, enhance educational equity across regions and produce future ready workforce that's strong in digital skills.
Final the final presentation was
leveraging good internet to advance education in Kenya. It was about the role of Kenneth. So one of the interesting points is Kenneth is sustained 100% by member institutions, and it was able to connect to the large European educational resources network and make its higher Kenyan higher institutions benefit. It's also connected to other African global Ariens or enhanced collaboration. So one of the key points highlighted here in this presentation was that focus should be on learning outcomes of students, rather than just digital inputs. And it was highlighted that it's possible to have a lot of impact on students and on education as a whole by utilizing technologies such as virtual labs. So this is it
from me. Thank you. Applause.
Thank you, Jon for the brief but insightful summary of what has taken
place in the last few days. For those of you who may have missed one of the parallel sessions, the recordings of the sessions is available on YouTube, so you can go to ISOC live, ISOC live on YouTube and revisit because the topics covered are quite broad.
Jon said it includes financed and connected education
infrastructure, so
on. Dr Dai, do we have time for
any reflections from the audience, or we move on to tie? Okay,
so any reflections on what you have
heard, what you have seen from the sessions the past few days, comments, questions and Come
to Mike over here and field your comments. You
right? All the ideas will come once you out here, there's One there,
who come here, if that doesn't work, okay? Working now. Thank you once more, especially, I think it's such an excellent job, but I could recognize the few points he made about my presentation. It's better than myself. I think I didn't attend the session, the parallel session, some of the parallel sessions. So when you are doing internet education, there was another parent session. It was addressing things to do with the law and Office solution to do, especially for this region. And I just wanted to ask the question whether, in the IGA region, have we actually been able to embrace or what is the reluctance in embracing the lower path of Stalin in Kenya, we use it quite a lot, especially for the northern Kenya, but Ethiopia, which is which is very difficult to serve. But with this, you can put it either as backup or primary. I just wanted to know what, what is the status of that in the eager region? Sorry, since the three presenters that session are not here, they were online, won't be able to respond, but maybe the floor is open to anyone here who can help answer to the question. But from my understanding, it's only Kenya that is allowing, currently Stalin to operate. So there are various reasons why countries can't accept this kind of services. So from what I understood from that session, they all said that these little solutions, are very important because they can provide services where other solutions cannot go. They are important, for example, some other areas where it will be very, very expensive to sell. However, there are also some concerns. Example, they can kill the local ecosystem, because not here, for example, if they this country, then local operators, and sometimes there's no local providers, can suffer. We have to find solutions, and I hope that in this kind of conferences, we can discuss lessons learned from other countries. Is, for example, you know, doing it for others. What is your lesson? What have been the impact? What have been the good things and the bad things that other countries can learn.
Thank you, Doctor
it. And to add, from my own personal experience, we had actually fielded this question to both Safaricom, Ethiopia and jotel in another forum some weeks back,
and the comment we received was in Ethiopia, the output, the average revenue
per user per month, is around 90 100 per between 90 and 100 per Kenya, it's Maybe twice or three times that.
So Safaricom rep said to us, an environment where the paying capacity of the consumer is 100
and the equipment
before the subscription costs at least $20
maybe more, I'm not quite sure, in Kenya.
So it may not be financially affordable yet
for individuals, but with potential discussions, there may be a way around caring or communalizing this access point, but at the moment,
they said cost individually will be higher as it stands, and they are also trying to still find a way to make it more affordable,
more people on the internet, using their tour. So there's many issues, I mean, some of them Dr David mentioned
for rural and less populated
areas, I think there may be a gap filling measure, but for dense areas, something like in Kenya may happen, where the capacity will run out In Nairobi, but
it it can be not so. Complimentary, not necessarily one replacing the other.
So I think the operators can have a discussion to see where this may work. Thank
you very much. I wanted to add
on what Professor mayoli has said. Initially, I was very pessimistic about the low Earth, the low Earth orbit solution, specifically Sterling. I think it's proving to be a game changer, and they are responding to some of the deficiencies that they had, specifically in Kenya. I think one of the major issues have been support. But other than support, personally, I have deployed two communities using Starlink, working with help NGO, were supported by Internet Society Foundation, and
yesterday, I was just looking at
the network monitoring system, and I noticed that the latencies have dropped from average of 300 milliseconds to less than 10. Been having over 300 milliseconds for the last one year. And I think this is a game changer, as I indicated in my presentation, one of the major costs community networks has been because of backhaul. The rural areas, 300 or 400 kilometers from Nairobi, you will find that probably we pay anything from 1000 shillings per Meg, which is about $10 when you come to the city, you probably pay about $100 for 100 Meg, which is dedicated. Can see the disparity. But for Starlink, you're getting two speeds of up to 300 megabits per second downloads and probably 100 uploads, which is very sufficient for the rural areas, and significantly deals with this issue of backhaul, which is a major challenge. So I think barring any other solution, then certainly it will be a threat to the existing ecosystem. And what is happening now is that styling is within Kenyan data centers. We talked about data centers yesterday. They have increased the ground stations. I think the ground station in Nairobi was launched yesterday or the day before. They are responding. They cry in the community. So now, when I look at it, it makes sense to do a hybrid network with the Leo solution and then last mile fiber, because what the community was complaining was the high latencies that was preventing them from getting good videos. I just wanted to add that it is solving a problem in the community, regulatory issues not withstanding. Thank you.
Thank you for your comment. Just to reflect, I think, you know, with more conversations, there could be more solutions.
One of the issues in the rural areas is the availability of power charge even people's phones. So I would like to hear how they solve that issue. We are advocating certain approaches in Ethiopia
to increase access. To tell you from my last week's experience, for example, I think why more discussions are needed. I was in the council and the abelo area, which is about 200 kilometers from Kenyan border.
Some of the people I met, farmers and pastoralists me, they have telecom signal their area. However, they don't have somebody to sell them a SIM card, both operators. So there are some, it looks to me, there are some low
hanging fruits to expand access while also working
on additional solutions that increase it further the
if I may, Regis for coming again, I
think on the issue of power again, the lessons that we've learned as community networks is you cannot depend on the national grid, and increasingly we are now relying on solar power. And now we are having a lot of DIY kits. I also never knew before that I would put together a solar solution. All you need is YouTube, and you can even do 3k VA. And increasingly, we are seeing this Chinese solar products filling our markets, and we have our towers. I've seen other players in Kenya, like American towers, where there's a base station actually provides space for the community to watch TV and to charge their devices, and even for us as community networks, one thing is that our stations are actually hosted by hotels in the community, hotels, yes, if somebody has a hotel, most likely, you'll find they have a standby Narrator or a backup solution for power. And you will find that we exchange provide connectivity, and they provide a infrastructure for us to use, and because they give us for free, we also provide additional access for power the community. And just to add that, specifically in Kenya, there are this call it M copper. Can buy a phone credit, a smartphone over time, which you pay on a daily basis. You pay maybe something less than $1 per day. And the telcos are the ones actually providing these devices. So again, you find that telcos and micro finance are providing the devices, which makes it easy for community networks to get consumers for the Internet services that they provide. So solutions are there, and they lie in the spirit of sharing, which is something that we as Africans do. Thank you. Also useful
comments please.
Just to add a couple of things to that comment, one of the things I've heard as we've spoken to our community networks that we support is that alongside training for connectivity, training for power supply, and managing power supply is important, and not just the power is missing, but also in urban areas where often power surges can fry equipment. We saw that recently with one of our projects in Nairobi just picking up as well, and barracks comment on offering power to the community. In previous work I've done where you are building connectivity infrastructure in an off grid area, there is a real value to understanding how you can improve the power production to provide to the community as well. This can really support the economic sustainability of a program as well. Average, someone in an off grid area will spend roughly a third to two thirds of their total cost of having a communications device, a phone or a laptop, access to informal power. If you can take some of that cost out for someone, it often comes back in payments to accessing the network, accessing connectivity, etc. So big part of reducing the affordability, also creating new revenue streams and improving the sustainability off grid community networks, is understanding the power needs of the community as well as the connectivity needs. How you can balance the offer and the pricing for that. It is one of the things foundation we want to look at we can help train our community networks. Understand not just how to build resilience into power and improve our availability where the Barrack is describing also then look at whether it's providing our two communities is another way to increase the economic sustainability of those networks. Thank you.
MC was signaling me there. I think this is valued. I
know there's some something in the works that involves all of the things you talked about. Was a trial in one of these areas. Be I'll take his contacts and connecting to the people that
benefit from discussing with him. That's I section of the program comes to an end, and I will hand over to
Mr. Tai for the rest
of the program. Thank you. Applause.
I think he deserves a great round of applause
before we break for coffee. Thank you so much. Do appreciate your support this morning, and thank you for your presentations as well. And thank you Johnny for the report. Great job you did overnight. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we're going to break for coffee for 20 minutes. We will be back here, like I said, for the official closing session. So please be back here in 20 minutes and we will Yes, hold on one second. Please. Please give me one minute. You
we want to celebrate
the two people who helped us this morning with our amazing coffee gifts. So that's why we are holding you back. So don't go to coffee before we give them the coffee. Flores, please bring the coffees up. Chris, you're going to be kindly doing as the honor of handing this gifts out. So Tori likal and Johannes if you could please come up here