G. Pascal Zachary/NYT The New York Times
ACCRA, Ghana The Internet bubble has long since popped in the United States, Europe and Asia. But in parts of Africa the Internet is serving as a powerful force for change, primarily by allowing companies and individuals to make international telephone calls far less expensively than through conventional channels.
Calls in and out of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the world's most costly, strangling business opportunities and burdening ordinary people. Services have been tightly controlled by state-owned telephone companies, many of which were rife with corruption and incompetence. African governments also imposed high tariffs on international calls.
But now, thanks to what is called voice-over-Internet, phone alternatives are flourishing, drastically lowering costs and expanding opportunities for business and consumers in some of the poorest places on earth - even as they pose a competitive threat to government-sanctioned telephone companies.
Sending telephone calls over the Internet is gaining ground in Africa because it makes possible a range of new services, linking the sub-Saharan to the world's major industrial centers in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. And better digital connections, mostly via satellite, are raising the hope that Ghana - a peaceful country in a West African region beset by civil wars and ethnic strife - may become the regional hub for an information-technology industry.
"As Ghana improves its connectivity to the outside world, it has the potential to become for Africa what Bangalore became for India," said Paul Maritz, a former senior executive at Microsoft who recently visited Accra to survey the nascent high-tech scene.
At a recent United Nations conference in New York, Kofi Annan, the secretary-general, delivered a message that developing countries also needed to include wireless access, known as Wi-Fi, in building an Internet system.
As the movement advances, though, many government-owned telephone companies, which dominate wired service in most African countries, are fighting a rear-guard action.
Internet telephony "is presented as the salvation for business and society in Africa," said Oystein Bjorge, chief executive of Ghana's national telephone carrier. "It is not."
Bjorge, a Norwegian telecommunications consultant hired recently to do battle against the Internet telephone services, says it wreaks havoc with the economics of state-owned phone companies. In Ghana, the national phone company is waging a sporadic campaign against its own citizens who use the Internet to make or receive telephone calls from America and Europe, periodically turning off the lines of those suspected of doing so.
Three years ago, the government even jailed the heads of some of Ghana's leading Internet providers.
Despite this opposition, U.S. companies are experimenting with new ventures in Ghana, seeing if enthusiasm for Internet telephony can transform local technology entrepreneurs into a force for genuine economic advancement.
For example, Rising Data Solutions, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, launched a call center here last month, where a dozen Ghanaians - trained in American-style English - are trying to sign up customers in the northeastern United States on behalf of a wireless phone company. At least three other call centers are expected to open in Accra later this year, all relying on Internet telephony instead of telephone carriers.
Internet telephony also aids companies like Newmont Mining, which is searching for gold in Ghana, the second largest gold producer on the continent after South Africa. To help manage its operation, Newmont plans to link its operations within Ghana to the wider world through the Internet.
Few people realized how much demand for phone service was waiting to explode until Ghana's most successful wireless company, Spacefon, started up in 1996. Before it began, executives thought the potential customer base was probably 3,000 people, at most 12,000. Seven years later, Spacefon has more than 300,000 subscribers.
The country's total phone lines are now approaching 750,000, roughly two-thirds of them wireless. But completing a call is still difficult, especially between rival networks (there are five), and neither Ghana Telecom, nor the country's legal wireless operators, can offer a reliable connection to the Internet.
"I'm paying $2,000 a month for Internet access, so I want to use the technology to the fullest," said Austin Addo, chief information officer of Ghana Link Network Services.
His telephone calls are not really free, since he pays $2,000 a month for Internet access. But he is still saving lots of money because he can speak as long as he wants without worrying about the cost.
Such productivity gains have been a cause for celebration almost everywhere in the world. But official anxiety over Internet telephony is widespread throughout Africa and particularly rife in Ghana. At a stormy public meeting in May, a regulator defended the government's latest campaign against those who use the Internet to bypass authorized telephone providers.
The government is not opposed to any particular technology, Bernard Forson, deputy director of Ghana's National Communications Authority, explained, but merely wants "regulated entities to provide telephone service," not unlicensed and untaxed wildcatters.
Source: International Herald Tribune, from The New York Times
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