Biztech Africa

Nigerian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have kicked against moves by the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) to sell the remaining spectrum in the 2.3 gigahertz (GHz) band, arguing that such a move will further compound the misery of operators licensed and currently operating within the band. The operators are Mobitel, Spectranet and Direct on Personal Computer (DoPC).

Safaricom has issued a statement clarifying its role in the election, saying its VPN had 100% uptime in the areas it covered. This comes in response to ‘public concern’ over technical glitches during the election.

Safaricom noted that it was one of several service providers contracted by the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission “IEBC” to provide network connectivity for the electronic transmission of electoral results.

A study released by the GSMA mWomen Programme and Visa entitled, Unlocking the Potential: Women and Mobile Financial Services in Emerging Markets, shows that women in developing countries represent a significant underserved market and commercial opportunity for mobile financial service providers. The study, focused on women in Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea and Tanzania, was undertaken to gain additional insight into how financial institutions and mobile network operators can better support the complex financial lives of women at the base of the pyramid.

Despite the successful pilot of m-health programmes in developing countries, especially in Africa, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says m-health implementation is still being hampered by competing health system priorities, which it has identified as a top barrier globally across high, upper-middle and lower-middle income countries.

WHO says that most health systems are severely overburdened, which means they are constantly challenged by the need to make difficult decisions about competing priorities.

Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) has awarded Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licences in the 2500 – 2690 MHz band to Surfline Limited and GoldKey Properties Limited, as well as an unpaired configuration licence to G-Kwiknet Limited.Each licence, costing USD6 million, is valid for 10 years.

“BWA licences are intended to provide wireless broadband connectivity to subscribers and licensees are authorised to develop and operate broadband networks to provide nationwide BWA services,” NCA said.

Ethio Telecom has announced that it will begin recycling prepaid SIM cards that have been inactive for six months. The telco says the prepaid mobile SIM lifecycle will be 6 months.

By mid February, any prepaid SIMs that have been inactive for 6 months will be put under a one way block, in which the SIM can receive incoming calls and SMSes, but not make any calls or send SMSes.

The number will then be blocked. After a one month ‘quarantine period’, the number will be recycled and ready for resale.

Benin has launched a project that will collect and disseminate food market prices by SMS.

Aiming to revolutionise the market information system, the project will see market information collected, analysed and shared on around 30 food products from 50 representative markets nationwide.

Dr Touré Yacoubou, DC Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, received the laptops and mobile phones, external hard drives and internet connection keys necessary to start the project this week.

AIRTEL Tanzania on Wednesday announced that it has reduced tariffs to 10 cents a second after the first two minutes of the call. "We have lowered our call rates by 70 per cent to continue to offer innovative, flexible and affordable value that meet the growing demands and needs of all our customers," Airtel Managing Director, Mr Sam Elangalloor said.

Interswitch, a Nigerian integrated payment and transaction processing company, has introduced Safetoken, which triggers One-Time-Passwords (OTP) when customers are performing payment transactions on the internet using their cards. The system generates a 6-8 digit One-Time-Password (OTP) whenever a transaction, meeting some criteria set by the issuer of the card, is initiated via the Interswitch Web Payment Platform, Webpay.

The Safetoken solution is in compliance with the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) policy on the mandatory tokens for some web payments.