ITU Telecom Africa 2004
10 May 2004

Hello, howzit, SABAR AL GIR and welcome to Cybersurf, a weekly window on the wonderful world of the Web. I am your Cyberhost, Steven Lang – freshly returned from Cairo, Egypt where I attended the Telecom Africa 2004 exhibition and forum.

The two pronged event was excellent – the exhibition, with more than double the number of exhibitors of the previous Telecoms Africa in Johannesburg in 2001, was well laid out, spacious and efficient.

The Forum - with a theme entitled “Advantage Africa” – had its ups and its downs. There were some panel discussions - such as the one on Voice over IP – or how to use the Internet to make cheap overseas phones calls; and the workshop on business models that were really well managed and informative – while others were dominated by pompous, windbags who just like hearing themselves drone on.

Telecom Africa 2004 was also a steep learning curve in acronyms – like which is better: CDMA or GSM? And is CDMA really two and a half G, or is it 3G? Other quick issues sure to confuse – what is fixed wire? What do you call it when fixed line calls make use of GSM; and what about cellphone callls that are routed through a fixed line back-bone?

No – I am not making up all this techno jargon just to show off – these were real issues debated in the forum and in the corridors of the exhibition.

One of the highlights of the Egyptian stand was a large scale model of what they call – the Smart Village – this massive office park which is still under construction, is fully serviced with the latest optic fibre technology and appears to be aimed at setting up a silicon valley alongside the Nile – or perhaps the idea is to follow in the development footsteps of Hyderabad in India.

Included in the “smart” infrastructure is a high speed network for data, voice and video transmission; VPN connect; Voip capability and data centre; cable TV and video conferencing centre; uninterrupted power supply and standby generators

There are many other advantages to setting up in the Smart Village – but in my view the killer app – the one that would really make businesses move to the village is a ten year moratorium on taxes!!!

Only ten percent of the area of the park is open to contruction – this means that just under ninety percent of it will be developed as parklands. Microsoft, Alcatel and others are already there – and so is the ministry of communications – but in my view the one critical element missing from the Smart Village – is the element that would really make it Smart and is the same factor that powers Silicon Valley and Hyderabad - that is a University.

The Smart Village would have been so much more convincing if there had been a University in centre that could churn out computer scientists with serious degrees in programming and computer science.

Nevetheless, it is a constructive plan that fits in with the rest of Egypt’s drive to become the ICT centre for the Middle East and Africa. In some respects it is already ahead of South Africa and with broadband costing less than half the price charged by our local Telkom – we could be relegated into second place very quickly unless our ministry of communications gets an attitude makeover.

That’s all we the time we have for Telecom Africa 2004 in Cairo. Be sure to join me again next Monday for more Cybersurf.