Experts are at odds on how to deal with the coming dominance of data over voice services on telecom networks, Niveen Wahish reports "We will be hit with a tsunami of data. We know it is coming, we do not know how we will handle it, and we want to stay in business." This is how Andrew Grenville, executive vice-president of the Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, known as Du, the United Arab Emirates' second telecoms operator, best summarised what telecommunications operators are facing. He was speaking at the Telecoms World North Africa conference held this week in Cairo. Organised by Terrapinn, the conference aimed at bringing experts together to brainstorm how to deal with the transformation of the telecommunications world from voice to data predominance. Ahmed El-Oteify, chairman of the conference and CEO of Varkon Group, a consultancy and business development company, cited some astounding figures. "Some four billion human beings will require some type of telepresence in the next 20-30 years," he said, adding that the number of connected devices will increase from over a billion to more than 10 billion with the amplification of mobile Internet. He pointed to very high adoption rates of new devices, such as the iPhone, which reached 57 million devices in nine quarters, compared to 11 million desktop Internet devices during the same time span. He stressed that the usage patterns of iPhone users indicates "an exploding trend in bandwidth requirements, putting large pressures on carriers. Improving social networking coupled with more mobile computing and the rise of the new Apple ecosystem and gaming will create an unprecedented change in the ways people communicate with each other and the ways developers, advertisers and vendors reach consumers." All this, El-Oteify said, is putting companies and executives in a situation where they "do not really have a clear picture on how this could affect their revenues and business models, nor what they should do in order to harness the fruits and keep their companies alive and profitable". As Osman Sultan, CEO of Du, put it, the telecommunications industry is going from "unshared certainties to shared uncertainties". Amidst this, he said, there are certain facts that will determine how operators work. Among these facts is that social networking is the name of the game. A second fact is that broadband access is becoming a basic human right, though perhaps sooner in some countries than in others. He called for different regulations to make broadband access broader. "It [broadband] is too important to be left to the interest of investors and the willingness of operators," Sultan stressed. To him, broadband access could enable the Arab world to catch up on what it missed out on in the industrial revolution, or at least to avoid widening the gap between industrial and Arab countries. On a similar note, El-Oteify stressed that carriers are investing in access but the backbone needs attention. For example, he said the cost of transport of Internet services is one of the largest in the world. He added that regional connectivity is not mature yet, in that connections between African countries are often not direct but go through Europe first. But making broadband a basic human right may be easier said than done. Bahjat Al-Darwiche, vice-president of communications media and technology at Booz & Company, a global management consultancy firm, pointed out that "the question is to make sure broadband investments are sustainable." Conference participants demonstrated various models of deploying broadband. Some spoke of how real estate developers are being asked to lay down the infrastructure for broadband in plots they are working on by deploying requisite ducts and fibre optical wiring. In other areas, municipalities are given the task of improving or establishing broadband infrastructure. But there are other aspects that must be tackled. El-Oteify underlined the need to invest in research and development (R&D). He showed that revenues for telecommunication companies in the region currently exceed $50 billion. If only two per cent of that amount were dedicated to R&D, and to putting in place the mechanisms to support small companies to develop applications, that would make a lot of difference, he said. Participants also discussed the feasibility of a fourth mobile licence in Egypt. While Mahmoud El-Guweiny, senior advisor to the Egyptian minister of communications and information technology, said there is no obstacle should the Egyptian government decide to have a fourth licence, he said whether the economy is ready for another operator is debatable. But according to Ekrem Yener, chief international business expansion officer at Turkcell, in Turkey the fourth operator collapsed. In fact, even the third and second operators are losing money, he said. Whether a fourth operator should be allowed or not depends on whether they can make profit in the span of five to six years, the usual time by which companies start making money, he said. He added that in a country like Egypt a lot of infrastructure development is required, to spread the network.
