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Africa’s ICT Infrastructure
7. See government of Namibia press release: “Namibian Government Lifts Telecom Namibia’s Switch Restriction” (http://www.telecom.na/index.php/media/ news/2-namibian-government-lifts-telecom-namibias-switch-restriction). 8. Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access. 9. In one case, VoIP operators in Namibia were arrested on the grounds of operating an unlicensed telecommunications service. An article about the arrest notes the impact of VoIP on “the viability of Telecom’s network by not paying Telecom Namibia right compensation. Illegal Net telephone operators are a pivotal challenge confronting not only Telecom Namibia but also the Namibian Government as a whole. These setups not only put the company’s rate/price structure at risk, but drastically reduces the tax benefits that could be reaped by the Government” (ITU 2006). 10. The HHI is “a commonly accepted measure of market concentration. It is calculated by squaring the market share of each firm competing in the market and then summing the resulting numbers. For example, for a market consisting of four firms with shares of 30, 30, 20, and 20 percent, the HHI is 2,600 (302 + 302 + 202 + 202 = 2,600)” (U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission 2010, pp. 15–18). Therefore, markets that are more concentrated by being dominated by one or two large players, for example, have a higher HHI than markets in which the players are evenly sized. 11. There are also four full-mobility CDMA operators in Nigeria, further intensifying competition in the mobile market. 12. This situation changed with the government’s decision in 2010 to give Zamtel control over ZESCO’s fiber telecommunications business in preparation for privatization. 13. The three major satellite operators supplying bandwidth to the African market are Intelsat, Arabsat, and Satellite Communication Services. In addition, there are other smaller operators including Nilesat and Eutelsat. 14. E1 is the international standard unit for small amounts of bandwidth and is approximately equal to 2 megabits per second. 15. An STM-1 is a standard large unit of bandwidth equivalent to 155 megabits per second. 16. Details on privatizations between 1993 and 2009 are reported in appendix 2A.6. 17. Although not strictly a strategic investor, Etisalat, the incumbent operator in the United Arab Emirates, owns 4.6 percent of Sudatel’s shares as well as the majority stake in Canar, the second fixed-line operator. 18. For example, in 2003, Pentascope was awarded a three-year contract to manage NITEL, the Nigerian incumbent telecommunications operator. The contract ended prematurely with Pentascope attributing a lack of success due