By Al Fomenky 
PANAPRESS Staff Writer

Dakar, Senegal (PANA) - Tyrone, Brown, vice chairman of Iridium Satellite LLC, has good reason to consider his latest move to introduce Iridium satellite telephony in Senegal a success.

At the end of a trip to Dakar in August last year, Brown signed a multi-million dollar contract with the Senegalese government to supply community phones to 1,000 rural villages.

But that represents only a small fraction of a potential market of 30,000 villages, to which the Senegalese government has plans to provide similar service and equipment in the next two years.

The ambition of the Virginia-based firm goes beyond grabbing contracts for those 30,000 remaining villages because Brown sees Senegal as a gateway to the " vast African market for telecommunication equipment in general and rural networks in particular."

" The Iridium community phone system we are selling to Senegal should lead the way in solving rural communication problems in many African countries, " he told PANAPRESS.

" African governments could overcome rural communication headaches if they got rid of excessive bureaucracy in the interest of development of their people, " he added.

Over the past decade, investments in telecommunications have quickly shifted from the traditional fixed data network towards networks of a multimedia and multi-service type, with mobile communications developing at a staggering pace.

But in sub-Saharan Africa, technological advancement is hampered by the heterogeneity of networks (association of analogous and digital equipment,) as well as by interface and propagation difficulties.

The situation is made worse as a result of poor supply lines for space parts, lack of harmonisation of signals by states in the same region, and destruction of equipment resulting from wars and aspects of vandalism.

Two years ago, an ITU (International Telecommunication Union) investigation revealed that Africa, which is home to 20 percent of the world population, accounts for a mere two percent of the global telecommunications network, with an average of less than two lines per 1,000 inhabitants.

This is compared to 48 lines per 1,000 inhabitants in Asia, 280 in the US, 314 in Europe and 520 for high revenue countries.

Even at the sub-regional level, there are huge infrastructure disparities in Africa, with the least-equipped areas stretching from Guinea to countries of the Sahel and the Congo Basin, which has less than 2.5 lines per 1,000 inhabitants.

Countries of the West and the East coast, with the exception of Senegal and Gabon, are comparably resource challenged, with 13 an 32 lines per 1,000 inhabitants respectively.
But generally speaking, the infrastructure development rate has grown more rapidly than European countries (5.7 percent as against 4.1 percent per year).

This positive evolution is, however, strictly limited to countries of North Africa and Southern Africa as Well as small-sized countries like Cape Verde, Gambia, and Mauritius, where infrastructure has increased at a relatively fast rate.

In those regions, for example, telecommunications density increased at the rate of 20 percent per year between 1990 and 1996.

As African countries increasingly grasp the inter-relatedness of broadband Internet connectivity and development, their governments will likewise increasingly come to grips with the need to make substantial investments in telecommunications.

They will recognise also the more acute problem that exists in rural areas, which are largely neglected, despite, the fact that 80 percent of the African population live there.

Poor telecommunications infrastructure makes it possible to offer only most basic services : fixed and mobile phones, fax, telex and slow data transmission. Where Internet access does exit, it is difficult to sustains, given the multitude of technical constraints and high access costs. As a result, new private operators build parallel networks, often leading to heavy financial losses.

Compounding the problem, administrative bottlenecks and rampant corruption take their toll as well. They must also be addressed if positive change is to come about and if potential investors are to be attracted.

According to Bassave Seydou of the International Telecommunication Union in Dakar, progress made in recent years in Africa is limited to the mobile phone system " because the fixed line phone systems are still under state control."

" To privatise the entire sector would require a lot of investment, especially as everything from simple cable is still imported. " Only Algeria, Egypt and South Africa have made timid attempts at producing some basic materials, " he says.

The other crucial problem for private investment is that of middlemen. To get into the Senegalese market, for example, Brown's Iridium Satellite needed a well-connected local representative to word the system to get a contract signed within a relatively short time frame.

Magatte Diop, president of the International Life Insurance Company in Dakar and Iridium's emissary to the government was hired to give the deal to supply the 30,000 rural communities in Senegal the best chance for success.

Diop's central role in the Iridium points to a total absence of public relations companies to which private investors can readily turn for official assistance in many African countries. To the extent that such services are available, the providers are often seen by interested foreign investors as extensions of corrupt governments.

That assessment, unfortunately, is not always correct.

Dakar,August 14, 2001