Mauritius Telecom Reports 17% Growth In Profits

Mauritius Telecom (MT) said pre-tax profits rose 17% year-on-year to MUR2.4 billion (USD89.1 million) in 2010, driven by strong growth at its mobile division. MT added that net profits rose 16% from MUR1.4 billion to MUR1.7 billion, and revenue climbed 5.6% from MUR7.1 billion to MUR7.5 billion. The company’s chief executive officer Sarat Lallah said the mobile segment grew by 10.4% in FY2010 compared with 6.7% in FY2009, while the internet segment also grew strongly. 

MT, which is 40% owned by France Telecom and is the country’s dominant fixed line and mobile operator, has revealed plans to invest as much as MUR4.3 billion, or 50% of its reserves, in international projects in the short term. It claims to have ‘sufficient reserves’ and that it is in talks with unnamed telecoms providers in Uganda and Vanuatu.

It is also looking to start trading its shares on the Indian Ocean island nation’s bourse, pending approval from the government, Chairman Appalsamy Thomas has said. ‘We are waiting for the decision from the Ministry of Finance,’ he added, ‘Once it’s obtained, it will take us four months before listing.’ Under the plan the government, the State Bank of Mauritius and the National Pension Fund will reduce their stakes in the company through the listing. About 10% to 15% of shares will be traded on the nation’s exchange, CFO Cyprien Mateos said.

France Teelcom In Bid For LION2 Cable

Click For Larger Image - Source France Telecom

France Telecom and the other members of the LION2 consortium have signed an agreement to build a new submarine cable in the Indian Ocean. The agreement comes less than a year after the inauguration of the LION (Lower Indian Ocean Network) submarine cable linking Madagascar to the rest of the world via Reunion Island and Mauritius.

With this latest agreement, France Telecom enters the second phase of its Indian Ocean development plan, pursuing its strategy for the regional expansion of broadband internet.

The 3,000km LION2 cable will extend the LION cable to Kenya via the island of Mayotte. The cable will provide Mayotte with access to a broadband internet network benefiting from a transmission capacity and service quality equivalent to those available in Europe. For Kenya, LION2 is an important project that will strengthen its connectivity to international networks and cover its capacity requirements for years to come. The project is being conducted by a consortium of France Telecom and its subsidiaries Mauritius Telecom, Orange Madagascar and Telkom Kenya, along with carrier companies Emtel, Societe Reunionnaise du Radiotelephone and STOI Internet.

The construction of the LION2 cable represents a total investment of around EUR56.5 million, about EUR31.25 million of which will come from France Telecom. Service is scheduled to begin in the first half of 2012.

LION2 relies on wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), enabling capacity to be increased without additional submarine work. The maximum potential capacity is 1.28Tbps. Two new landing stations will be built, one in Kaweni for Mayotte and the other at Nyali near Mombasa for Kenya. The second of these is doubled up with existing stations and will be used to redirect traffic if needed.

SEACOM Cable Fails

SEACOM has confirmed that services between Mumbai and Mombasa have been down since yesterday morning, after a repeater failed. The cable operator has confirmed that the fault will take 'an extended period of time' to fix, possibly as long as eight days.

Most ADSL service providers which use SEACOM bandwidth have already started to re-route international traffic via SAT-3/SAFE. The failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe; traffic within Africa is not affected. ‘SEACOM has initiated emergency repair procedures to replace the repeater. Once mobilised, the repair ship is deployed to the location of the fault to pick up the cable. The cable is then brought on board to undergo the repair — the faulty element is replaced with a new repeater — before being put back in the water,’ an official statement read.

It is not the first time that the SEACOM cable system has experienced connectivity issues in recent months; it suffered a major outage in April. SEACOM is a Mauritian-based company, owned 76.56% by African investors. The remainder is owned by Herakles Telecom, an international development group based in New York City.

Madagascar Connects To EASSy

Madagascar has been connected to the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), AfricaNews.com reports. Fixed line incumbent Telecom Malagasy (Telma) has announced that it has already put in place a national backbone that will allow it to connect its subscribers to the cable, and it is expected that the arrival of the link will allow for the development of outsourcing activities, such as call centres. EASSy will supposedly enable the transfer of data at speeds 40 times faster than dial-up connections, and 27 operators from 22 countries across Africa’s eastern coast have invested approximately USD260 million in the deployment of the cable so far.

The arrival of the EASSy connection is the second significant cable landing reported in Madagascar in the last twelve months.  In June 2009 Madagascar’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, Orange Madagascar, announced the completion of its submarine cable project, LION, connecting the cable at Tamatave in the Toamasina region. Funded by Orange Madagascar, France Telecom and Mauritius Telecom, the 1,800km broadband cable links with the existing SAT3/WASC and SAFE cable and has a capacity of 1.3Tbps, and it also connects Madagascar with the islands of Reunion and Mauritius.

Orange Partners With Alca-Lu In Multimedia Deal

Alcatel-Lucent has announced that Mauritius Telecom (MT), an Orange/FT Group partner, has deployed interactive mobile multimedia services (IMMS) powered by the Alcatel-Lucent Mobile Interactive TV (MiTV). MiTV will allow Orange to establish mobile multimedia services throughout East Africa and Indian Ocean, enabling each affiliate to quickly launch its own dedicated content offering and commercial bouquets while sharing the same software platform.

Alcatel-Lucent offers a complete turnkey mobile multimedia package, which provides Mauritius Telecom's customers with a large range of customised services. In total, end-users are able to access 20 live channels, eight near-live channels and eight playlists. With this solution customers can also access program information via an intuitive graphical user interface and can watch TV whenever and wherever they want.

‘With the Alcatel-Lucent mobile interactive TV, Mauritius Telecom has the opportunity to establish a dominant position in the Mauritius mobile TV market and create a new growing revenue stream from their investment in high capacity networks,’ said Amr El Leithy, head of Alcatel-Lucent's activities in Africa and the Middle East. ‘It is the first deployment of the MiTV Compact platform in an emerging country – highlighting this solution's ability to deliver quick market entry at a low cost.’

France Telecom Plans To Cut Call Rates With New System

France Telecom (Orange) intends to cut the cost of call services in most of its African markets by implementing a new system it calls ‘Cell Broadcast’, Arnauld Blondet, the director for emerging countries, announced on Tuesday.

‘We launched Cell Broadcast in Botswana under the [local] name Sesolo. With the number of people interested in that offer, we can be optimistic about trying it soon in most of our African subsidiaries,’ Blondet told news agency PANA at the presentation of the technique.

France Telecom operates in 15 African countries including Egypt, Uganda, Mauritius, Madagascar, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Niger, Cote d'Ivoire, Mali, Senegal, Guinea, Kenya and Equatorial Guinea.

Economic Growth In Africa Linked to Internet Speed

African countries could boost their economies by increasing high-speed Internet access and affordability, according to a report by the World Bank.

For every 10 percentage-points of increase in high speed Internet connection, the authors found that economic growth rises 1.3 percentage points.

"In this report there's a lot of evidence that where you have broadband, you have innovation, you have lower transaction costs, and you have higher trade and exports," said the report's editor Christine Qiang.

Sub-Saharan Africa Ranks Lowest

The seven countries that ranked lowest on affordability, access and usage of Internet and Communication Technologies were all in sub-Saharan Africa.

The reason less than one percent of Africans have access to high-speed Internet is because it is still too expensive and the quality is sub-par, explained Philippe Dongier, another author on the report.

Still, progress is being made, he says. For example, in countries along the east coast of Africa, the World Bank is working with private investors to install underwater fiber-optic cables.

Mauritius a Tech Success Story

Mauritius also serves as good example.
In 2000, before the government started implementing reforms, Mauritius was ranked near the bottom, along with Ethiopia.

"The government was very vigorous in terms of sector reform," Qiang explains. "And now eight or nine years later, Mauritius scores about an eight, on a scale of one through 10, which I think is quite outstanding."

Public-Private Initiatives Key

The authors say the report is proof of how important it is for governments to create a market mechanism for the Internet and communications industry.

"This is a sector where the private sector has been really the engine for growth. And in that sense, it's not about aid. It's really about policies to make markets work so that the economies can grow.

"It's also important for governments to partner with industries, to go even faster than what the market can do, so that they can really take part of this global phenomenon and be part of the global economy," Dongier says.

--Voice of America.

East Africa Serves as Laboratory for Competition in the Telecoms Industry

The top mobile markets in East Africa and the Indian Ocean islands are amongst the most liberalised on the continent. The top three markets are Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and they all have about 10 million subscribers.

Each of these three markets has been a laboratory for competition. For example, Tanzania has issued seven mobile licences and Uganda has issued six. The number of operators has resulted in increased investment and marketing spend in the top three markets. And in all three countries, this competition has benefited African consumers as the cost of owning and using a mobile phone has fallen

Tanzania and Uganda have what is known as a unified licensing framework and this has encouraged operators to offer mobile broadband to their subscribers. Each country now has several hundred thousand subscribers who access the Internet using their mobile phone.

Based on data gathered for a new report from Balancing Act, there have been dramatic drops in mobile charges, opening the market to a wider number of users. For example in Kenya, between Q3, 2007 and Q4,2008, calls to other subscribers on the same network fell by over half, from KS18.10 to KS8.98. Over the same period, SMS text messages to subscribers on another network fell from KS5.03 to KS3.69.

Amongst the 15 countries in this report, there are really only 5 countries that have any scale in population terms: Ethiopia (83 million), Tanzania (39.5 million), Kenya (38 million), Uganda (29.5 million) and Madagascar (20 million). At the other end of the scale there are five countries and territories - Comoros, Djibouti, Mayotte, Reunion and Seychelles - with populations of below 1 million.

Nevertheless, it is in the main the Indian Ocean Islands with small populations that have much higher GDP per capita than the more populous countries: Reunion (US$23,501), Seychelles (US$18,700), Mauritius (US$11,300) with a population of 1.27 million, Mayotte (US$4,900) and Djibouti (US$3,700). Tourism has driven growth in Mauritius and Seychelles and the connection to France for the territories of Mayotte and Reunion has had a similar effect. All the other countries in this report range between US$160 (Ethiopia) to US$1,100 (Comoros). None of these countries has oil but Tanzania has natural gas reserves.

The reason? The Seacom international cable started operating on 23 July 2009 and the Kenyan Government initiated project TEAMS will follow shortly thereafter. And in Q3, 2010 will come EASSy, the fibre project that started it all but is now lagging well behind in the field.

In addition, France Telecom has a project called LION that will connect various of the Indian Ocean islands into these new international cable connections in October 2009: the build has been completed and it now awaits licensing approval.

The mainland East African countries currently connected by satellite will see a large increase in international bandwidth used as prices come down from around US$5,000 per mbps to something more like US$500 on the new fibre connections. This cheaper bandwidth price should lead to cheaper Internet prices for consumers.

SIM Users IN Mauritius To Register

Users of Prepaid Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) cards in Seychelles will, in the future, have to register their telephones with their providers under a new law that will be passed soon, the Director General of Communications at the Department of Information, Communications and Technology (DICT), Dr George Ah-Thew announced Sunday in the Seychellois capital, Victoria.

Ah-Thew declared on Sunday that some operators already offer their clients the option of voluntarily registering their mobile telephones but added that it has now become imperative to introduce such regulations as people have been using prepaid mobile telephones to commit offences.

Also, Ah-Thew pointed out that the new law will make provision for those people who buy new prepaid starter packs to give their personal information, including their name and addresses. They will also have to bring their ID cards with them so that the providers can verify their details, he stated.

He further stated that all the information will be kept confidentially by the operators.

For his part, Jean Toussaint of the police force indicated that since last year there has been an increase in the number of malicious calls and texts sent by prepaid mobile telephones and that the new regulations will help cut the cost of tracking down unregistered mobile telephone users.

Toussaint further indicated that those persons who refuse to register their telephones by the given time will have them disconnected.

Such regulations are already in force in Mauritius and South Africa, Toussaint declared.