Opinion / Columnist
Whatsapp and Skype - Mobile Operator's Headache
15 Jan 2016 at 14:30hrs | Views
Traditionally the telecommunications industry has been a very regulated one not just locally but internationally. But as technology surged forward with faster and faster computing power, other alternative communication channels mushroomed all over. From instant messaging, e-mail, VoIP and more. Regulation of air waves for different operators and services ranging from walkie takies, TV, radio, GSM, WiFi, Microwave etc is fairly straight forward as guided by ITU via allocation of specific frequency bands for specific services and operation . In this arena an operator is allocated a "space" in the electromagnetic spectrum for his services. This is the basis for payment of licenses to get a frequency "slot" that is unique to them.
Now enter the Internet the ball game has changed. The large portion of the internet uses non-proprietary protocols which means creative developers are able to design and launch different types of messaging, voice, video, presence, tracking, web services that uses the application layer of the communications protocol . This means that these apps can run on any physical layer of communication be it copper, fibre, coaxial or radio waves. Regulation of these is not a challenge as you can not just dig and bury fibre any where nor mount a "base station" tower in your back yard without proper authorization. Services and applications designed and deployed on the application layer using 0s and 1s, commonly referred to as programming , are difficult to regulate. There some countries that block websites like Facebook and other web based services. This is achieved via various security implementations that block by IP address of origin, protocol type or port type or some form of pattern matching algorithms. In plain English an example would be like at my birthday party please do not allow anyone putting on a blue T-shirt to gain entrance (joke).Traffic filtering and blocking can be done at a router or switch or proxy as determined by the blocker. This is just an example. Once upon a time internet telephony was illegal in Zimbabwe. I mean VoIP. So blocking it was via blocking the protocol it uses which is SIP using port 5060.
The VoIP example is a very good learning source for telco operators and regulators to learn from. Instead to jumping to say this and that is illegal and it must be blocked, they should channel more resources into staying abreast with current technology trends and developments via investment in research and development (R&D).Because VoIP does not care what the transmission medium is, it becomes very difficult to tie a user to SIM card or copper wire permanently. As a result voice can travel via different routes in packets and reassembly at their final destination. The important point being that you must have a decent internet connection to have a decent voice conversation when using VoIP .VoIP has been fingered as the cause of the divorce between distance of talking parties AND the cost of the call. In the past Telcos have benefited from the geographic distance which voice has to travel between two points but well the speed of light has trivialized this. I mean fibre optics technology.
More than a decade ago most regulators had no answer to Internet telephony it other than to ban it. Thus making it a crime to use the internet to make a telephone call. I sympathize with them. But fortunately as the clock ticked with more and more countries adopting VoIP our local regulator put up a regulatory framework so that VoIP services could be provided without having to worry about some jail term. We are talking about a decade now. What is the fuss. Making calls over the internet is very cheap. And it does NOT matter where you are in the world, internet telephony rubbishes the concept of a telephone company as conceived by Bells Laboratory. Unfortunately most African telcos and regulators want to resort more to regulation than innovation. Well those days of owning what users access when and how are almost over.They must wake up and smell the fish. Very soon they will be very few things to regulate other than spectrum frequencies.
A few days ago 13 January, 2016 a South African online broadband blog reported that South Africa's "Portfolio Committee on Telecommunications and Postal Services has scheduled hearings into the regulation of Whatsapp and Skype in South Africa." As reported by Zim's own TechZim and TechnoMag in their own blogs seeking answers to questions like "why and how" and also how will Zimbabwe ICT space deal with OTT regulation amongst other things.
MTN and Vodacom argue that these so called over the top services (OTT) like Whatsapp and Skype must be regulated as they feel they are having a free ride on their infrastructure. True that. In November last year Vodacom South Africa's biggest mobile network Vodacom indicated that they wanted a regulatory approach to data-driven over the top (OTT) .They claimed that they had invested billions of Rands to upgrade their network and surely they did realize some reasonable increase in data BUT services such as Whatsapp were eating into their other revenues like SMS and voice.
While I understand and sympathize with the mobile operator's dilemma caused by their insatiable apetite for monopoly, thirst for revenue, crave for protection and indifference towards R&D, I find their stance twin forked. Read on. Operators have themselves to blame as they were in deep slumber enjoying SMS revenue and now that these revenues are being swept away the regulator must step in. In Zimbabwe PTC was a monopoly and our mobile operators NetOne, Telecel and Econet ended that monopoly and we were all happy. The disruptive agents the mobile operators went to sleep and other disruptive players sprung up and now they are wondering what hit them. Complacency, lack of innovation, reliance on protection .Ask the postman what e-mail did to his stamps while he was busy cycling door to door delivering letters and chit chatting with residents !
Mobile operators alike do very much welcome services such as Facebook and YouTube so long as they drive traffic and revenue on a network. But on the other hand applications like Skype or WhatsApp are not so welcome as they erode their revenue streams .As a solution they must either be banned or contribute to the operator network's infrastructure costs. Mobile operators say that it cost them money to build their networks - true that. And so they are saying Whatsapp must pay for riding on top of their network. In that case so should Facebook and Youtube who ride on their networks. Does the term "double standard" ring a bell in your ears ?
Recently a local giant operator Econet Wireless Zimbabwe sued POTRAZ the regulator for $ 132 million for loss of revenue with the former claiming that the loss of revenue was "caused" by the regulator's directive to slash calling rates amongst other things. The writing is on the wall. Let us face it folks it is NOT just the slash in calling rates but innovation elsewhere that is cannibalizing their revenues.
When a person has a headache they are encouraged to drink water and maybe take some Panadol(c) to get some relief.My prescription to the operators is that they must spend more time on innovation, and invest in R&D, reverse engineering, re-shape their business models to keep up with ever changing technology and stop being grown up cry babies. We sincerely hope you will change rather hope for regulation and legislature to save your butts. Having worked in a multi million dollar ICT R&D laboratory, innovation is not a luxury but it is a known fact that firms with a persistent R&D strategy outperform those with an irregular or no R&D investment program at all.
The same applies to regulators they must stay abreast with current technology trends and avoid resorting to the "ban and block it" mechanism whenever their thinking tanks run empty.
Considering that I had to leave the country more than a decade ago because I was learning and practicing VoIP which was illegal in Zimbabwe (2002), only to return to a more receptive but still soft-stone aged regulatory framework is just splendiferous !
Twitter: @RobertNdlovu
Now enter the Internet the ball game has changed. The large portion of the internet uses non-proprietary protocols which means creative developers are able to design and launch different types of messaging, voice, video, presence, tracking, web services that uses the application layer of the communications protocol . This means that these apps can run on any physical layer of communication be it copper, fibre, coaxial or radio waves. Regulation of these is not a challenge as you can not just dig and bury fibre any where nor mount a "base station" tower in your back yard without proper authorization. Services and applications designed and deployed on the application layer using 0s and 1s, commonly referred to as programming , are difficult to regulate. There some countries that block websites like Facebook and other web based services. This is achieved via various security implementations that block by IP address of origin, protocol type or port type or some form of pattern matching algorithms. In plain English an example would be like at my birthday party please do not allow anyone putting on a blue T-shirt to gain entrance (joke).Traffic filtering and blocking can be done at a router or switch or proxy as determined by the blocker. This is just an example. Once upon a time internet telephony was illegal in Zimbabwe. I mean VoIP. So blocking it was via blocking the protocol it uses which is SIP using port 5060.
The VoIP example is a very good learning source for telco operators and regulators to learn from. Instead to jumping to say this and that is illegal and it must be blocked, they should channel more resources into staying abreast with current technology trends and developments via investment in research and development (R&D).Because VoIP does not care what the transmission medium is, it becomes very difficult to tie a user to SIM card or copper wire permanently. As a result voice can travel via different routes in packets and reassembly at their final destination. The important point being that you must have a decent internet connection to have a decent voice conversation when using VoIP .VoIP has been fingered as the cause of the divorce between distance of talking parties AND the cost of the call. In the past Telcos have benefited from the geographic distance which voice has to travel between two points but well the speed of light has trivialized this. I mean fibre optics technology.
More than a decade ago most regulators had no answer to Internet telephony it other than to ban it. Thus making it a crime to use the internet to make a telephone call. I sympathize with them. But fortunately as the clock ticked with more and more countries adopting VoIP our local regulator put up a regulatory framework so that VoIP services could be provided without having to worry about some jail term. We are talking about a decade now. What is the fuss. Making calls over the internet is very cheap. And it does NOT matter where you are in the world, internet telephony rubbishes the concept of a telephone company as conceived by Bells Laboratory. Unfortunately most African telcos and regulators want to resort more to regulation than innovation. Well those days of owning what users access when and how are almost over.They must wake up and smell the fish. Very soon they will be very few things to regulate other than spectrum frequencies.
A few days ago 13 January, 2016 a South African online broadband blog reported that South Africa's "Portfolio Committee on Telecommunications and Postal Services has scheduled hearings into the regulation of Whatsapp and Skype in South Africa." As reported by Zim's own TechZim and TechnoMag in their own blogs seeking answers to questions like "why and how" and also how will Zimbabwe ICT space deal with OTT regulation amongst other things.
MTN and Vodacom argue that these so called over the top services (OTT) like Whatsapp and Skype must be regulated as they feel they are having a free ride on their infrastructure. True that. In November last year Vodacom South Africa's biggest mobile network Vodacom indicated that they wanted a regulatory approach to data-driven over the top (OTT) .They claimed that they had invested billions of Rands to upgrade their network and surely they did realize some reasonable increase in data BUT services such as Whatsapp were eating into their other revenues like SMS and voice.
While I understand and sympathize with the mobile operator's dilemma caused by their insatiable apetite for monopoly, thirst for revenue, crave for protection and indifference towards R&D, I find their stance twin forked. Read on. Operators have themselves to blame as they were in deep slumber enjoying SMS revenue and now that these revenues are being swept away the regulator must step in. In Zimbabwe PTC was a monopoly and our mobile operators NetOne, Telecel and Econet ended that monopoly and we were all happy. The disruptive agents the mobile operators went to sleep and other disruptive players sprung up and now they are wondering what hit them. Complacency, lack of innovation, reliance on protection .Ask the postman what e-mail did to his stamps while he was busy cycling door to door delivering letters and chit chatting with residents !
Mobile operators alike do very much welcome services such as Facebook and YouTube so long as they drive traffic and revenue on a network. But on the other hand applications like Skype or WhatsApp are not so welcome as they erode their revenue streams .As a solution they must either be banned or contribute to the operator network's infrastructure costs. Mobile operators say that it cost them money to build their networks - true that. And so they are saying Whatsapp must pay for riding on top of their network. In that case so should Facebook and Youtube who ride on their networks. Does the term "double standard" ring a bell in your ears ?
Recently a local giant operator Econet Wireless Zimbabwe sued POTRAZ the regulator for $ 132 million for loss of revenue with the former claiming that the loss of revenue was "caused" by the regulator's directive to slash calling rates amongst other things. The writing is on the wall. Let us face it folks it is NOT just the slash in calling rates but innovation elsewhere that is cannibalizing their revenues.
When a person has a headache they are encouraged to drink water and maybe take some Panadol(c) to get some relief.My prescription to the operators is that they must spend more time on innovation, and invest in R&D, reverse engineering, re-shape their business models to keep up with ever changing technology and stop being grown up cry babies. We sincerely hope you will change rather hope for regulation and legislature to save your butts. Having worked in a multi million dollar ICT R&D laboratory, innovation is not a luxury but it is a known fact that firms with a persistent R&D strategy outperform those with an irregular or no R&D investment program at all.
The same applies to regulators they must stay abreast with current technology trends and avoid resorting to the "ban and block it" mechanism whenever their thinking tanks run empty.
Considering that I had to leave the country more than a decade ago because I was learning and practicing VoIP which was illegal in Zimbabwe (2002), only to return to a more receptive but still soft-stone aged regulatory framework is just splendiferous !
Twitter: @RobertNdlovu
Source - Robert Ndlovu
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