There is an urgent need for new approaches to financing and building of information and communication infrastructure in Africa. My project is to address this through the implementation of Open Access Models in Africa with the creation and development of a repository of academic and practical knowledge. I would work with African governments, regulators, policymakers, private sector and consumers on how to implement Open Access Models in their countries. For more information, please visit www.openaccessforafrica.org

Introduction
Originally I applied to the DV Program with an Open Communication Policy Initiative Project, upon acceptance into the programme in 2004 I was at the same time invited by the WorldBank through her Information for Development Programme (Infodev @ www.infodev.org) to join two other colleagues to conduct an Open Access study within the framework of “Leveraging New Technologies and Open Access Models: Options for Improving Backbone Access in Developing Countries (with a Focus on Sub-Saharan Africa)” under the auspices of Spintrack AB, a Swedish consulting firm @ http://www.infodev.org/en/Publication.10.html.

Discussions with the DV leadership led to acceptance of my change to focus on Open Access for Africa and afforded a long term affiliation with the Program as a Visiting Fellow and Scholar because my project has a long term life cycle.

Open Access in the context of Communication (Open Communication) means that anyone, on equal conditions with a transparent relation between cost and pricing, can get access to and share communication resources on one level to provide value added services on another level in a layered communication system architecture.

The concept of Open Access to Communication Resources is central in the ongoing transformation of the communication market from a "vertically integrated" market with a few operators owning and operating everything between the physical medium and the end-user, to an "open horizontal market" with an abundance of actors operating on different levels and providing value added services on top of each other.

This means creating competition in all layers of the IP network allowing a wide variety of physical networks and applications to interact in an open architecture. Put plainly, anyone can connect to anyone in a technology-neutral framework that encourages innovative, low-cost delivery to users. It encourages market entry from smaller, local companies and seeks to ensure that no one entity can take a position of dominant market power. It requires transparency to ensure fair-trading within and between the layers based on clear, comparative information on market prices and services. It seeks to build on the characteristics of the IP network to allow devolved local solutions rather than centralized ones.

Open Access is also about broad approach to policy and regulatory issues that starts from the question: what do we want to bring about outside of purely industry sector concerns? It places an emphasis on: on empowering citizens; encouraging local innovation, economic growth and investment; and getting the best from public and private sector contributions. It is not simply about making micro-adjustments to the technical rules of the policy and regulatory framework but seeking to produce fundamental changes in the outcomes that can be delivered through it.

Problem
ICT Infrastructure stalemate in Africa - because of the link between government ownership and the operation of the historic operator, policy-makers are caught in a trap: on the one hand, they are inclined to protect their asset through making choices that do not disadvantage the historic operator but on the other hand, they need to find ways of opening up the market to provide better services for their citizens. This tension has made independent regulation difficult to achieve: often both government and regulator have a natural inclination to defend the status quo in the form of the historic operator as a “national asset” and this created a stalemate in the development of ICT infrastructure.

The state of privatization in Sub-Saharan Africa - according to the ITU, only 3 historic operators were fully privatized in Africa and 34 were partially privatized or in the process of privatization. The remaining 13 were state-owned. There have also been a significant number of “distressed” privatizations (most notably Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania) where the new ownership has created a significant number of unresolved legal issues. In 24 out 48 Sub-Saharan African countries, the historic operator maintains a monopoly on international voice.
Without privatization, Governments lack the resources to invest in network development.

The failure of SAT3 to deliver cheaper bandwidth – In the Republic of South Africa, Telkom South Africa charges $25,000 for an e1 circuit on SAT3. The Ghana ISP Association has managed to reduced this from $12000 to $5000 over the past two (2) years but in both cases the cost of an e1 on fiber is far more expansive than satellite so most operators still use the later. The government of the Republic of South Africa has not being able to get a copy of the Construction and Maintenance Agreement (C&MA) from Telkom South Africa till date, when a copy was made available to us through some other medium it was clear that the intent of the Closed Club SAT3 League was to create a “cartel” with high prices hence the massive unutilized capacity on the cable.

Solution
Proposed concept to DV and WorldBank with colleagues – the Open Access Study opened up the thinking of building infrastructure and service in a different way from the traditional closed approach of lamping them together.

The WorldBank made a public declaration for Open Access as a framework for their implementation of ICT Infrastructure development in February 2006 and then in June 2006 the Eastern and Southern African Heads of States under NEPAD also made a public declaration on Open Access as the framework for development and establishment of the East African Submarine System (EASSy).

The Open Access study and these declaration resulted in a paradigm shift in the thinking of Infrastructure buildout where most constituencies saw the need to separate Infrastructure from Services with the following generic principles;

1. Anyone can play
Particularly because of the potential for locally-provided services and network growth “at the edges” made possible by flexible technology and open network models, Open Access models should assure that any provider willing to play by the rules can “plug and play” in the network.

2. Technological neutrality
Regulation should be technology-neutral, taking into account the cost and physical properties of the technologies themselves. No one should be stopped from using a particular technology and indeed a progressive regulator would encourage cost reduction through technology innovation.

One needs to recognize that in future a wide range of applications will require higher bandwidth. But there may be no significant (order of magnitude) improvements in the performance of fibre, particularly its installation. However with wireless there will be significant improvements in performance and cost/capacity ratio and therefore wireless solutions will become more attractive in local distribution applications.

3. Fair and non-discriminatory competition at all layers
Competition should be fair and non-discriminatory. There should be no predatory pricing, cross-subsidization or aggressive cross-ownership. Regulators will need to be capable of dealing with a range of competition issues to ensure a genuine level playing field, and to prevent market strength in one layer from creating unfair competitive advantage at another layer. For all services at a given layer, there ought to be at least two providers and whenever there are not 4-5 providers of a particular service, issues of competitive position would need to be examined.

What is true for countries at a national level holds true at a regional and international level. Ideally any country should have a choice of at least two providers to connect to neighbors and the rest of the world. The EU competition policy formulation of “significant market power” provides a useful benchmark against which competitive position might be examined.

4. Transparency to ensure fair trading within and between layers
Competitive markets thrive on transparent information about market prices and service. Internal accounting processes in companies need to be sufficiently transparent to enforce fair-trading. If there is tradable bandwidth – particularly at an international level – it will allow clear comparisons to be made between different providers. There needs to be greater levels of consumer information to allow comparisons between “offers”, including offers at the interface between layers.

The different roles of players need to be transparent. In order to create trust in the market, infrastructure providers need to be clear that they will not enter service markets to compete with their customers. The regulator exists to encourage competition rather than restrict it but to do so in a way that genuinely encourages increased investment and lower access costs to communications technology. Where appropriate, regulation becomes “light-touch” rather than prohibitive or restrictive. Government exists to create the legal framework through which competition issues can be mediated.

5. Everyone can connect to everyone else at the layer interface.
In order for a competitive market to function, everyone must be able to connect to everyone else. Service providers would be able to get access to infrastructure from the local to the international level, whether they were small or large entities.

There will be inevitable interconnection rate issues where the interests of the infrastructure provider in keeping re-investing in the network need to be weighed against the opportunities that can be created for greater levels of new business.

6. Devolved rather than centralized solutions
It is important to ensure that the “intelligence” in the network is to be found at the edges of the infrastructure rather than at its centre. In other words, the infrastructure provider should not be allowed to reserve for itself all of the functions that create value in the market.

In practical terms, it should be possible to create a local entity that can operate on the small or medium-scale and can “plug into” the network without needing to cede control over its activities to the infrastructure provider. Local operators need to be able to own and control a significant level of “intelligence” in the system (eg billing, features, etc) to encourage open access.

Suddenly there is the emergency of the Open Access church with some of the believers being the incumbent PPTs who would have wanted EASSy in a closed club manner like SAT3.

Implementation in Africa
EASSy Cable – The East African Submarine System (EASSy @ www.eassy.org) in adhering to Open Access must align with the structure and principles below in order to ensure that all the believers are believing in the same principles and adhering to same;
1. Within the structural framework, the cable must differentiate “Infrastructure” from “Services” where Infrastructure is seen more in the “Ownership” realm whiles Service is seen in “Access to capacity”.
2. A set of principle would hold for the ownership of the cable and those principles would be different from those for access to capacity.

The most distinguishing feature of the Open Access approach is that, ownership of the infrastructure DOES NOT GUARANTEE any access (discriminatory or not) to capacity on the value chain for the provision of service to the market.

Infrastructure ownership principles for the cable include;
1. The ownership of the EASSy cable must be in a public private partnership involving Government, PTTs, ISPs, Educational Institutions, Civil Society and Consumers.
2. A fair distribution of these constituencies from the member countries in an equal sub-regional distribution leading up to the Board of Directors of the enterprise.
3. The same set of rules must be established to identifying the various shareholders from the various countries in the different constituencies
4. For the purposes of this exercise a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) must be a legal entity with an African wide structure, which must have a majority Africa ownership in order to trade in the various countries.
5. The SPV must have a public interest combined with a private sector approach in it’s business model in order to ensure a “regulated return on investment” to ensure cheap and affordable bandwidth to the end-user.

Value Chain access to capacity for Service delivery principles for the cable are;
1. The SPV must sell capacity to all entities who meet the legal and regulatory requirements in each country directly, non-discriminatorily.
2. Service Providers shall be offered Transport Infrastructure Layer access to different capacities depending on their requirements.
3. End Users shall be free to choose any local Service Provider connected to the Regional Network.
4. The SPV shall not compete with Service Providers (its customers) by offering services at the Services Layer directly to End Users.
5. All countries must create a regulatory structure that recognizes the SPV.
6. The SPV shall be formed, owned and operated in such a way as to facilitate competition and to foster innovation at the Services Layer, and where practical and commercially viable at all levels, with a view to maximizing usage of the network and benefits to the End Users.

My project is now at this stage where we need all the Open Access believers to adhere to these principles in the EASSy cable build out. This would enable the multi-stakeholder approach to leverage existing examples like Level3 – www.lelvel3.com, which according to Stuart Gannes is an example of a US build out within which my ideas fall based on the principles of the structural paradigm.