A US Trade and Development Agency-funded feasibility study for Nigeria’s Hotspot Network Limited has led to the issuance of financing for the deployment of 120 solar-powered rural telecommunications base stations across 22 states in Nigeria.

USTDA’s focus is the export of US goods and services for priority infrastructure projects in emerging economies. In this case the project will utilize renewable energy to provide last-mile mobile connectivity to underserved rural communities that lack the requisite power infrastructure for reliable telecommunications.

Hotspot is a telecommunication infrastructure and solar-powered rural telephony network provider, using renewable energy and climate-smart technology in operating telecom sites in off-grid rural parts of Nigeria.

Co-financing the project are Nigeria’s Infrastructure Credit Guarantee Company (InfraCredit) and the Climate Finance Blending Facility, funded by the United Kingdom Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). This co-financing attracted matching investments from nine Nigerian institutional investors.

USTDA’s feasibility study, announced in 2021, assessed Nigeria’s rural telephony market, defined the project’s technology, cost and revenue options, and recommended financing and implementation plans.

USTDA’s support for this activity results from a memorandum of understanding (MoU), also in 2021, with InfraCredit to jointly identify infrastructure projects in Nigeria that could benefit from project preparation funding and subsequent credit enhancements. The sectors of cooperation highlighted in the MoU include clean energy, information and communications technology, transportation, agribusiness and healthcare infrastructure.

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The mobile money platform, the largest in Africa, will take on incumbent operator Ethio Telecom’s own fintech service, Telebirr

This week. Kenyan operator giant Safaricom has launched their M-Pesa mobile money platform in Ethiopia.

The move marks a key part of newcomer Safaricom’s Ethiopian strategy, seeking to replicate the success that their M-Pesa already enjoys in numerous markets across the African continent.

M-Pesa was first introduced by Safaricom in Kenya in 2007. Since then, the service has grown almost exponentially, expanding into six additional African markets and processing transactions worth over three times Kenya’s GDP every year.

Safaricom grows Ethiopian subscriber base

The consortium now known as Safaricom Ethiopia (at the time called ‘The Global Partnership for Ethiopia’) first entered the market back in 2021, having paid the government $850 million for a mobile operating licence.

Since then, the company has been racing to rollout mobile infrastructure, as well as signing a network sharing deal with incumbent Ethio Telecom in April 2022 to begin offering services across the country.

Today, the company’s own infrastructure covers over 21 cities, with the company having attracted over two million subscribers.

The path to launching their own mobile financial services, however, has been less clear.

A rivalry brewing with Ethio Telecom’s TeleBirr

Launching M-Pesa in Ethiopia was one of the key attractions for Safaricom in battling for a mobile operating licence, with the country’s population of 120 million presenting extraordinary potential for revenue growth. However, the company was restricted from launching M-Pesa immediately, with the Ethiopian government forcing them to wait a year in order to give incumbent Ethio Telecom a chance to launch their mobile money platform first.

This Ethio Telecom did in 2021 in the form of TeleBirr, allowing customers to make cashless transactions using their mobile device, including sending and receiving money, depositing and withdrawing cash from selected locations, paying bills, and receiving cash sent from abroad.

With no local competition, TeleBirr quickly racked up customers in Ethiopia’s mobile money space, earlier this year reporting roughly 34 million active users of its platform. In the six months from July 2022 to January 2023, the platform reportedly processed roughly $3 billion in transactions, generating around $1.5 million in revenue for Ethio Telecom.

The scale of TeleBirr’s lead in the Ethiopian market should not be underestimated – M-Pesa’s entire user base across all seven of its existing markets is roughly 53 million users.

Nonetheless, the addressable market in Ethiopia continues to grow at an impressive pace, with Safaricom noting M-Pesa’s role as a key enabler for expanding financial inclusion, just as it has done in Kenya.

“M-Pesa is known to be a game-changer for financial inclusion,” said Stanley Njoroge, Safaricom Ethiopia’s interim CEO. “We will continue to broaden the services our customers receive from the M-Pesa platform.”

Next steps for Ethiopia

The Ethiopian government is only part way through its telecoms liberalisation journey, with plans to sell off a 40% stake in Ethio Telecom recently drawing attention from major international operators, including Orange and e&.

The government has also indicated that it still has plans to relaunch an auction process for an additional telco operating licence in the country, potentially increasing the number of national operators from two to three.

However, both the stake sale and the licence auction have been delayed numerous times, both by the global economic situation and civil unrest in the country’s Tigray region. Even now, with the economy somewhat more settled and the cessation of hostilities, no concrete timeline has been proposed for either process.

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Also in the news:
Sky Business considers buying up TalkTalk B2B unit
Australian govt launches Telecommunications Disaster Resilience Innovation programme
SK Telecom to invest $100m in AI firm Anthropic  

A bunch of interesting infrastructure news items from EMEA: … [visit site to read more]

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After receiving complaints, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) told the ISP that its adverts were “misleadingly implying that a sixth-generation mobile network existed and was able to be used by consumers”

This week, the ASA has announced that it has banned a number of adverts from UK ISP 6G Internet, after receiving a complaint that the company’s name could lead consumers to believe the company was offering non-existent 6G mobile services.

After an assessment, the ASA ruled that 6G Internet may no longer use its adverts in their current form, saying customers could easily be confused into believing 6G mobile services were being offered.

6G Internet said they were not aware of any complaints from consumers or regulatory bodies about the confusion, arguing that their adverts made clear that the service being offered was home internet, not mobile services.

Regardless, the company has agreed to comply with the ASA’s decision regarding their adverts and has made minor changes on their website to hopefully clarify their service offerings.

“We make clear in all of our advertising the download speeds of our services and that we provide home broadband, as opposed to mobile broadband delivered using generations of cellular technologies,” explained 6G Internet in a statement. “Whilst we have not found, or been presented with, any evidence that our advertising has caused confusion, it is never our intention to mislead customers.”

6G Internet, which provides home broadband services using fixed wireless technology connected to local wholesale fibre networks, was founded back in 2013, at a time when even 5G mobile services were still but a glimmer in the wireless industry’s eye.

Nonetheless, the company’s brand name was always going to draw comparisons to the future mobile technology 6G, which is gradually growing more prominent in the public consciousness despite being unlikely to mature until 2028 at the earliest.

For now, 6G Internet has not indicated any intention of changing its brand name but, when the 6G mobile era arrives towards the end of the decade, further confusion on the part of consumers seems inevitable.

Ultimately, UK broadband consumers still have a very poor understanding of what technologies are being used to provide services. Earlier this year, for example, Ofcom found that only 46% of customers who believed they were receiving ‘full fibre broadband’ actually had fibre-to-the-home available to them. As a result, the regulator is currently pressing operators to clarify their broadband offerings and be more careful with the terminology used in advertising.

Are the UK’s ISPs doing enough to ensure customers understand what they are paying for? Join the network operators, regulators, and the wider telecoms industry in discussion at this year’s upcoming Connected Britain conference   

Also in the news:
Sky Business considers buying up TalkTalk B2B unit
Australian govt launches Telecommunications Disaster Resilience Innovation programme
SK Telecom to invest $100m in AI firm Anthropic  

Hard on the heels of yesterday’s news about its sister company Vumatel’s success in the South African FTTH market, fibre infrastructure provider Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) has launched a R400 million (about US$21 million) fibre network infrastructure expansion project.

The news came in the form of a statement from Maziv, the parent company of both DFA and Vumatel.

Quoted in a number of local news outlets, Maziv says the reason for the expansion was to enhance provision of connectivity hardware to allow high-speed connectivity to more businesses and contribute to South Africa’s digital transformation efforts, “enabling greater access to online services and improving economic growth”.

This isn’t unexpected. The project has apparently been in trial phase since February and is now being rolled out at scale.

News resource MyBroadband says DFA will deploy 800 additional dry underground distribution cabinets (DUDCs) as part of the upgrade project. These units have been developed and manufactured in South Africa to DFA’s specifications.

Maziv says the additional units will dramatically shorten the distance data travels from the customer and over the network using dedicated cables, ensuring the shortest possible installation times and, Maziv suggests, reduced downtime during repairs and maintenance activities. The infrastructure upgrade will be carried out in three phases over roughly 18 months.

The project should also accommodate future growth and demand on the network, with the ability to scale up fibre deployment to meet demand as it increases.

This news comes a week after South Africa’s Competition Commission blocked a Vodacom takeover of Vumatel and DFA, though the proposal may now be taken to the country’s Competition Tribunal.

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The drafted legislation would see a mechanism created to share spectrum between the military, state security services, and commercial operators, even granting the military emergency powers to shut down networks

A new draft of Russian’s 2035 telecommunications strategy could see the Russian military gain significant powers over civilian mobile networks, including the right to disable them if a state emergency is declared.

According to a report from Kommersant, the new bill includes a new mechanism through which Russian military and security services can share mobile spectrum with commercial operators. This shared spectrum will reportedly be managed by a dedicated third party, which the report suggests could be Russian censorship agency Roskomnadzor.

For the mobile operators, this shared spectrum could provide a boost in service quality for customers, providing much needed additional capacity. On the other hand, it will give the military far greater influence over public networks, both in terms of monitoring and service provisioning.

The report notes that the new telecoms strategy will also enable the military to seize control of civilian networks if a state of emergency is declared. This includes the right to shut off networks entirely if desired.

Overcoming spectrum struggles

The Russian military’s relationship with civilian mobile spectrum is already a complicated one, particularly when it comes to 5G. Years of disjointed spectrum policy have left many of the prime 5G spectrum bands, including the so-called ‘golden band’ of 3.4–3.8GHz, partly occupied by state apparatus, including the Federal Protective Service (FSO), the Federal Air Transport Agency, the Ministry of Defense, and the Russian space agency, Roskosmos.

Seeking to rectify this issue, the Russian mobile operators set up a joint venture in 2017, now known as New Digital Solutions, aiming to work together on 5G spectrum strategy and research.

“The lack of frequencies suitable for creating 5G networks in Russia is one of the most significant constraints. The JV has a very large amount of work ahead of releasing radio frequency resources, taking into account the whole range of issues – regulatory, organisational, technical, economic,” explained Rostelecom president Mikhail Oseevsky back in 2021.

But despite some progress in clearing certain spectrum bands, challenges in this area persist, with a Beeline (VEON) spokesperson last year noting that there was still “significant technical limitations in the use of existing radio services using the main spectrum band for the development of 5G mobile networks over the 3.4–3.8GHz band”.

Now, the new telecoms strategy is seeking to overcome this challenge by simply banning commercial operators from the 3.4–3.8GHz band, reserving it for state usage and pushing the commercial network operators towards alternative frequencies.

“Explicitly, the draft strategy will include a ban on the use of the golden band,” explained Maxut Shadayev, head of Russia’s Digital Development Ministry. “We will develop 5G. There are other available bands for 5G, for example, 4,400-4,990MHz.”

Challenges extend beyond midband

The Russian operators’ spectrum woes are not confined to the mid-band. Russian operators theoretically hold the rights to use the valuable 700MHz low-band spectrum for 4G and 5G services, but these bands are currently occupied by broadcasters. In fact, backed by a number of regulatory rulings, the broadcasters have proven loath to migrate their services away from these frequencies, attempting to charge the mobile operators exorbitant prices in exchange for doing so.

The government’s sympathy for the broadcasters in this battle may be wearing thin, however, with the government was now considering ordering the broadcasters to vacate the spectrum.

“They believe that the operator must pay. They made an assessment, received some estimated amount, and the number was quite high; the operators are not ready to pay that much for it,” explained Shadayev, noting the government was exploring the possibility of “removing the spectrum in principle”.

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Also in the news:
Sky Business considers buying up TalkTalk B2B unit
Australian govt launches Telecommunications Disaster Resilience Innovation programme
SK Telecom to invest $100m in AI firm Anthropic  

Kenya’s leading operator Safaricom says it has increased account limits on its wildly popular M-Pesa mobile money service to KSh500,000 (about US$3,477) following approval from the Central Bank of Kenya.

The higher account limit was effective from 15 August 2023, for all M-Pesa customers.

In addition to the higher account limit, M-Pesa customers are also set to enjoy an increased daily transaction limit of KSh500,000 per day. The current per transaction limits of KSh150,000 (about US$1,043) will remain. However, customers can make as many transactions up to the daily limit as they wish.

Safaricom suggests the move is set to be a boost for businesses in the country, especially SMEs, as the share of cashless transactions continues to rise. In the last financial year to March 2023, more than 606,000 businesses were receiving payments through Lipa Na M-Pesa, with a total of KSh1.625 trillion (about US$11. 3 billion) transacted in the 12 months.

M-Pesa transaction limits were previously increased in March 2020 when the Central Bank of Kenya approved the doubling of transaction limits to KSh150,000 and daily and account limits to KSh300,000.

Of the new limits, Peter Ndegwa, CEO of Safaricom, says: “We appreciate the role that the Central Bank of Kenya has played by constantly providing guidance on innovations and protections that we have put in place to strengthen M-Pesa’s adherence  to KYC, anti-money laundering and other financial regulations and safeguards. The increased account limits will provide customers and especially small businesses with increased convenience as the share of cashless transactions continues to rise.”