Economic Development Potential through IP Telephony for Namibia

IP telephony, economic growth, telecommunications, ICT, Granger causality, Namibia

Mobile Cellular Telephone: Fixed-Line Substitution in Sub-Saharan Africa

Mobile cellular telephones have been the success story of communications globally. In the developed world, mobile telephony is traditionally seen as being complementary to fixed-line telephony, primarily because of its pervasiveness but also because the fixed-line network provides access to other technologies such as broadband. This article finds that, in nine African countries, in contrast to the developed world, mobile telephony is a substitute for fixed-line telephony – across all income groups and not just low income households as previously thought. The article argues in addition that pre-paid payment options (not just for mobile phones) are key to increasing use by low income households because irregular incomes do not support regular financial commitments in terms of contracts

Mobile Telephony Access and Usage in Africa

This paper uses data from nationally representative household surveys conducted in 17 African countries to analyse mobile adoption and usage. The paper shows that countries differ in their levels of ICT adoption and usage and also in factors that influence adoption and usage. Income and education vastly enhance mobile adoption but gender, age and membership of social networks have little impact. Income is the main explanatory variable for usage. In terms of mobile expenditure the study also finds linkages to fixed-line, work and public phone usages. These linkages need, however, to be explored in more detail in future. Mobile expenditure is inelastic with respect to income, ie the proportion of mobile expenditure to individual income increases less than1% for each1% increase in income. This indicates that people with higher income spend a smaller proportion of their income on mobile expenditure compared to those with less income. The study provides tools to identify policy intervention to improve ICT take-up and usage and defines universal service obligations based on income and monthly usage costs. It helps to put a number to what can be expected from lower access and usage costs in terms of market volume and number of new subscribers. Linking this to other economic data such as national household income and expenditure surveys and GDP calculation would allow forecast of the economic and social impact of policy interventions. Key policy interventions would be regulatory measures to decrease access and usage costs, rural electrification and policies to increase ICT skills of pupils and teachers

Mobile termination benchmarking : the case of Namibia

The debate over the regulation of mobile termination rates in Europe concluded in 2009 with the recommendation by the European Commission for national regulators to reduce termination rates to the cost of termination of an efficient operator. The debate in Africa is ongoing. The case of Namibia is presented as an example of termination rate benchmarking as an alternative regulatory strategy in order to overcome regulatory and institutional bottlenecks. Operators have argued that a reduction in termination rates will force them to drop subsidies on handsets and calling prices. This paper makes several arguments against these claims

Public Hearing on termination rates Portfolio Committee on Communication

PowerPoint presentationThe development of the telecommunications sector is critical to the development of South Africa, and the complex institutional arrangements that exist in law need to be regulated. The factors that have contributed to this regulatory impasse, legal bottlenecks, regulatory capacity, and institutional arrangements need to be addressed. The presentation provides data comparing the situation in OECD countries and Southern African countries, advocating for proper pricing and regulation

Gender assessment of ICT access and usage in Africa

This policy paper draws on a rich data set arising from the household and individual access and usage survey conducted across 17 African countries. It is clear from the evidence that although there is gender inequity, poorer men and women may have more in common when it comes to ICT access and usage than women and men across income, and urban and rural divides. Of the limited demand-side data on Africa, very little is disaggregated on gender lines. This study provides a descriptive statistical overview of access to ICTs by women and men and their usage of them

Namibian telecommunication sector performance review

Namibia fares well when comparing the cheapest prepaid product available, occupying the middle of the field in a comparison of 18 African countries. However, for the cheapest product available from dominant operators, ‘MTC' Namibia is the third most expensive prepaid operator, surpassed only by Cameroon and Burkina Faso. This is significant since it means the majority of people pay high prices, with MTC having a market share of around 80%. Meanwhile Telecom Namibia struggles to deliver returns that would be expected from any owner other than government. The Namibian ICT Sector Performance Review (SPR) analyzes sector developments for policy makers and regulators

ICT access and usage in Africa

Findings indicate that ICT sector reforms have generally been sub-optimal; insufficient competition or effective price regulation has constrained take-up and usage. This paper reports on findings of the second household and individual user survey of access and usage between 2007 and 2008 across 17 African countries. The high cost of communications inhibits ICT access, constrains individual communication and inflates the input cost to businesses. Through network development, Research ICT Africa (RIA) is building an African knowledge base to support ICT policy and regulatory design processes, and monitors and reviews policy and regulatory developments on the continent

E-skills

This policy paper draws on data from the Household and Individual Access and Usage Survey conducted across 17 African countries regarding connectivity and access to ICTs. The paper proposes that the stock of citizens with completed secondary and tertiary education is the best indicator for computer and internet skills. This research identifies an indicator that captures e-skills better than existing indicators in use. E-skills permit those who have them to participate more effectively in the global information economy and society, access opportunities to conduct business, and engage and transact more efficiently

Skin Doctor: Machine learning models for skin sensitization prediction that provide estimates and indicators of prediction reliability

The ability to predict the skin sensitization potential of small organic molecules is of high importance to the development and safe application of cosmetics, drugs and pesticides. One of the most widely accepted methods for predicting this hazard is the local lymph node assay (LLNA). The goal of this work was to develop in silico models for the prediction of the skin sensitization potential of small molecules that go beyond the state of the art, with larger LLNA data sets and, most importantly, a robust and intuitive definition of the applicability domain, paired with additional indicators of the reliability of predictions. We explored a large variety of molecular descriptors and fingerprints in combination with random forest and support vector machine classifiers. The most suitable models were tested on holdout data, on which they yielded competitive performance (Matthews correlation coefficients up to 0.52; accuracies up to 0.76; areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves up to 0.83). The most favorable models are available via a public web service that, in addition to predictions, provides assessments of the applicability domain and indicators of the reliability of the individual predictions. View Full-Text Keywords: skin sensitization potential; prediction; in silico models; machine learning; local lymph node assay (LLNA); cosmetics; drugs; pesticides; chemical space; applicability domainpublishedVersio