ETHIO-TELECOM: TO CONNECT OR NOT TO CONNECT

Saturday, 30 July 2011 0

France Telecom took over the management of the former Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) last September, introducing a new structure classifying the company’s workers in five categories: N-1, N-2, N-3, N-4 and N-5, where N-1 represents the top management including officials of the French Telecom.

 Officials of the France-based telecom company, a.k.a. Orange, announced the new structure last September that eventually lead to the dismissal of about half of ETC’s employees. ETC had in excess of 12,000 employees. Moreover, the telecom monopoly has been engaged in restructuring not only its human resources but also the services it renders, which is displeasing customers, writes

The arrival of the France-based telecom giant was welcomed by many with a sigh of relief, especially for a country whose Internet connectivity has been very poor. Users of the fixed line broadband and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) have both been having trouble getting quality services for which they paid.

For an internet café that provides Internet connections on 10 to 12 computers through a 256 kilobytes per second connection, subscribes from Ethio Telecom for 4,000 birr a month, the wide room of Right Click Internet Café only has a couple of customers both logged on Facebook, YouTube and a jobs website. One of the customers, Samrawit Yilma, 22, is a college graduate who is in search of a job.

 "I come to this place at least three times a week," she says. "Sometimes connection is good. At other times it is terrible. The other customer, Mesfin Arega, 19, frequents to keep in touch with his sisters and friends who live in the U.S. He uses Facebook to chat and Gmail to email her. He complains that the connection problem usually has him sitting in front of the computer without an uninterrupted or fast connection.

They are among the millions of customers who have in some way subscribed to a service from the telecom monopoly but are complaining about the persistent problem in connectivity over the last couple of months.

The connection problem is not only limited to fixed line broadband; people who use wireless CDMA network are also complaining.

Dialup Internet, let alone broadband, was considered to be an extravaganza a little over a decade ago. Only international organizations like the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the then Organization for African Unity (OAU), and a few non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with their own satellites and embassies had access to the internet.

In January 1997, Ethiopia, through the state monopoly, the then-ETC, joined the world of the Internet. Since then, a number of customers, albeit slowly at first, have subscribed to the 56kbs connection, and gradually the broadband connection. Even this was limited to people who had businesses and owned computers.

Since 2002, when the former ETC started allowing the establishment of Internet cafés, access to the Internet has been made available to the public from 10 cents per minute of use, depending on the establishment.

The subscription rate for the CDMA 1x and Evolution-Data Optimized (EVDO) services is too fast and it has gone far beyond the company’s expectations.

According to data released a year ago by the telecom monopoly andzgōngxīng Tōngxùn Gǔfèn Yǒuxiàn Gōngsī (ZTE), the Chinese multinational equipment and Systems Company, by July 2010, subscribers to EVDO increased to 6,679 and CDMA 1x to 47,073 from 304 and 2,359 subscribers, respectively, a year ago.
At the moment, owners and customers are far from content.

 Internet cafés used to be a somewhat profitable business but depended on providing uninterrupted use of the service to customers. However, many owners who pay for fixed line and wireless broadband have recently been suffering due to the lack of dependability of the connection. Including Nokia and Ericsson, the company has contracted different international vendors to lay down both its mobile and Internet connections and, since 2007, ZTE has been constructing and implementing its network.

ETC’s network for data and voice, which was running on Cisco’s network, whose capacity was almost used up, has been replaced with a new network called Internet Protocol Next Generation Network (IP NGN) by ZTE. This has enabled ETC to offer more services and add new customers in the past couple of years.

The Internet connection from Ethiopia connects to the international gateway through fiber-optic cables laid to Djibouti and Sudan as well as one satellite.

 Although the cables have a capacity to transfer 10mb of data and voice per second, the bandwidth that ETC bought has only 2x622mb on the sea cable from Djibouti and 3x155mb on the cable from Sudan, while the satellite connection has 80mb. As is stands South Koreans hook to the internet at 14 mbps which is the fastest in the world and Ethiopia struggles at a meager 5 kbps.

An IT professional, who requested anonymity, says that the narrowness of data transmission capability on both sides has been unable to meet the demand from customers as the connection was established mainly to check emails.

According to him, many people are now empowered through Internet cafés and ownership of PCs and are constantly browsing the Web.

However, not all the Internet connection problems are caused by narrow bandwidth as there is an interruption in connection whenever the fiber-optic cables are cut. Unless the bandwidth to the international gateway is increased, the same problem might persist, the expert explains.

However, many of the owners are complaining that they have to deal with a loss of revenue, not only from the lack of connection, but the loss of their frequent customers who, being unable to get their usual service, move on to other centers.

The bottleneck is not just from the side of the customers. Internally, the state-owned telecom company under the stewardship of the French management has long been under fire for the laying off of thousands of its employees. The labor union has been in a fix with the management of the company and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (MoCIT).

With regard to at least satisfying the customers’ demands, Ethio-Telecom stopped making unlimited EVDO Internet access available to customers on April, 2011.

The announcement of the revised packages and new products was made public a couple of months ago by Abdurahim Ahmed, manager of external communications, and Jean Michel Latute, CEO of Ethio-Telecom.

The new EVDO packaging and pricing system does away with the former unlimited service package. Instead, it offers packages of one, two, and four gigabytes at monthly charges of 300 birr, 500 birr, and 700 birr, respectively. Once this runs out, customers must pay 35 cents per megabyte of use.

The former unlimited EVDO service package of 4,000 birr per month allowed customers to see and download unlimited amounts of software, pictures, and videos.

However, even the comparatively cheaper 4GB package will cost the café more, according to some. Yet, the service providers’ network problems persist.

"We have been receiving complaints about the slow Internet connection the country is experiencing and the unavailability of Internet services on most mobile phones," Latute said. "Ethio-Telecom is increasing the security of Internet traffic through a microwave system as a national backup plan, to cope with Internet outages, which will be finished by August or September this year."

Ethio-Telecom is to expand the Internet fiber-optic system routes in addition to the ones already laid on the Port Sudan–Metema–Addis Ababa and Djibouti–Addis Ababa routes.

There will be one additional line added to the Djibouti route and another one between Mombassa and Addis Ababa by the end of April 2011, officials at the telecom monopoly confirmed.

Aside from the revised Internet packages, new tariffs for mobile phone services, mobile SIM cards, and replacement SIM cards were introduced.

Ethio-Telecom has adjusted its tariff rate to introduce a new flat rate for mobile phone calls of 72 cents during peak hours and 30 cents during off-peak hours. Unlike the previous structure, the new tariff rate allows no price difference linked to tariff zones across the country.

The fixed rate would benefit Seid Abdella, 28, who has a Gonder mobile number.

Living in Addis Ababa made most of his calls more expensive for being charged as "long-distance," but with the rate adjustment, the amount he spends on mobile cards should decrease substantially, he claims.

"The new system of charging flat rates is efficient and cost-effective for the user," Latute said at a press conference regarding the issue.

The tariff revisions are being touted by Ethio-Telecom as a move towards making Ethiopia’s rates the lowest among countries in East Africa.

Ethiopia’s fixed-line tariff is one of the lowest in Africa, according to the International Telecommunications Union’s (ITU) 2010 African Telecom Indicator.

However, the challenges faced by the monopoly and the customer dissatisfaction are gradually piling up and for customers like Samrawit, the future is highly unreliable. "I still hope for a better connection in the future," she says.