Uganda regulator to install bandwidth monitor

The Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) is set to acquire a gadget it will use to measure and monitor internet bandwidth within Uganda as it attempts to regulate this segment of the communications market.
Currently, there is no mechanism of establishing whether the bandwidth Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offer internet users including UCC itself is the actual agreed upon capacity
“We are planning to get equipment that will help us in monitoring the bandwidth. If you agree with the service provider to give you, say, 60 kilobytes there is no mechanism of establishing that it is the actual bandwidth you are getting,” Isaac Kalembe, the media and public relations specialist at UCC said.
A lack of proper regulation of ISP’s activities has raised concern among internet users over the years. Users have always complained that UCC does not have a way of regulating especially the efficiency of ISPs in respect to the services they offer users.
Equipment that measure bandwidth can measure it both as raw capacity and available bandwidth.
From a user’s perspective, with this equipment, UCC will be in position to know how much bandwidth is available to every individual user and will be in position to monitor ISPs better.
This development is ever more urgent considering that despite the shift away from satellite connectivity by a lot of ISPs to SEACOM’s fibre optic cable, users said they have not experienced a difference in the speeds of the connections.
“We have problems with our service provider. We were promised double the bandwidth at the same cost but you find the Internet fluctuating most of the time. We are yet to realise the bandwidth speeds that were promised,” an official attached to a regional office of one of the leading computer software companies said.
She said her company had not noted any difference in speeds since the ISP they are subscribed to announced they had connected to SEACOM.
Teopista Aboa, the IT officer at Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) said the standards body had not realized any change in speeds despite being told that they had been connected to the undersea optic fibre cable.
Professor Venansius Baryamureeba, dean faculty of Computing and IT, Makerere University said there is need for regulation because the lay person cannot establish whether they are being cheated or not because they do not have the equipment to measure or ascertain whether they are getting their money’s worth.
“If there is no monitoring, your Internet Service Provider might see that you paid for more bandwidth than you actually use and try to divert some of it. There is really need for monitoring,” he said.
Kalembe said that despite a lack of equipment to monitor internet bandwidth, internet users can still use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to ensure that they are not exploited.
“Some people get connected without signing SLAs or sometimes when they sign them they do not read them properly,” he said adding that the major problem is that most people do not know their rights regarding communication services.
He said signing SLAs would, for instance, help in establishing whether the bandwidth agreed upon will be at the point of entry or reception.
“If this does not happen you need to contact your service provider and if there is no change you can contact UCC for action,” Kalembe said.
He however did not mention who the vendor of this equipment is, how much it will cost and when the equipment will be installed.

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Innovation, use of IT still low at 50 universities in East Africa

By Edris Kisambira
An e-readiness survey of higher institutions of learning in East Africa that was carried out in 2008 has indicated that region’s universities are limited on innovativeness and use of information technologies (IT).
The report, which was released last week in Kampala, the Uganda capital focused on accessibility, usage and availability of information communication technologies (ICTs) services in 50 universities around the East African region.
The East African region takes in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.
According to the study, which was commissioned and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, only 43% of the student population at the 50 campuses were taking part in global IT competitions that would otherwise give them international recognition.
Such competitions involve students or lecturers in developing innovative software like the Google Cup that takes place annually in Paris, France.
“Innovative projects give the universities more credibility in the world,” Professor Meoli Kashorada from the United States International University (USIU), Kenya said. “This can be achieved both by students and lecturers.”
The report indicates that the limited innovation is due to the student computer ratio and the availability of cheap bandwidth.
Rwandan universities had the best ratio at an average of seven computers per 100 students, 6.8 per 100 students in Uganda, 5.2 per 100 students in Kenya, 2.7 per 100 students in Tanzania and 1.5 per 100 students in Burundi.
This according to Professor Kashorada, the senior investigator of the report, is below the target which is 10 computers per 100 students.
The limited innovativeness at the universities has translated into poor records management and admission processes that are characteristic of long queues at universities when new students are being admitted and old ones are renewing their status.
An example is Makerere University, Uganda, the oldest university in East Africa that has the best IT facility in the region but still there is no computer programme that has been developed and installed to electronically register students without them having to queue for hours if not days.
“There is need for IT department heads to clearly present projects that benefit the whole university and push for reforms. The young people need to be given the opportunity to be innovative,” Professor Venansius Baryamureeba, the dean of the faculty of Computing and IT at Makerere University said.
Rwanda despite having the best student to computer ratio and the cheapest internet costs in the region due to a government subsidy also has high number of students leaving campus to go to Internet cafes to do research online. This though is blamed on the stretched university budgets and few facilities.
Burundi, which is just recovering from years of instability, has 70% of the student populations at its universities using Internet cafes.
It is hoped the switch from the expensive satellite connectivity to fibre optics could reduce the cost of bandwidth which will make the connectivity much faster and closer to the students.
The report reveals that fibre connectivity could lead to a rise in access from between 300 – 700 kilobites per second to 1 megabite per second for 1,000 students.
“I hope we shall not be embarrassed if we fail to absorb the fast Internet that is coming to our region. We need to have the capacity to utilise it,” Proffessor Francis Tusubira of Directorate for ICT Support at Makerere University said.
The report mentions Uganda as one of the countries where university websites are non-interactive and there is still low budget financing for ICT programmes.
According to Professor Timothy Waema of the University of Nairobi, there is still time for this to change. He says that university heads need to play a major role because they needed to make sure atleast 3% of their budgets go to ICT in general.
This annual report is compiled by the Kenya Education Network in conjunction with the Tanzania Research and Education Network, Rwanda Research and Education Network and Research and Education Network of Uganda (RENU) with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.

A local search engine for Uganda

As the drum beats for the development and use of locally generated Internet content in Uganda and indeed Africa get louder, someone has gone ahead to develop a search engine that indexes all the available local content as well as that which will be created in the future.
Reinier Battenberg, the brain behind this search engine calls it a sort of Google or Yahoo. The search engine which can be found at http://search.mountbatten.net is exclusively Ugandan, the same way Google or Yahoo were for the US before they spread beyond the US borders.
Battenberg says the search engine; the first of its kind in Uganda and possibly the East Africa region, is limited to searching websites that are within Uganda and are connected to local Ugandan internet.
“It lets you search Uganda-based websites. People say there is no local content but we have indexed all Ugandan web pages. They are just over 100,000 pages and that is quite substantial. So the argument that there is no local content is not entirely true,” Battenberg said.
Battenberg who is also the director Mountbatten ldt., a local web hosting and developing provider says local hosting in Africa is underestimated and a lot of internet users don’t know what local content is, but that there is a lot of potential for locally hosted Uganda websites with local content.
“It could be your local lawyer, accountant, dentist – all these people need websites and if they are targeting audiences in Uganda, there is no reason for them to host their websites outside the country,” Battenberg said.
Battenberg says hosting one’s website within the country comes with its pluses including your site downloading faster, it being cheaper and being more accessible. However he says a lot of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) don’t encourage local hosting because their networks are not configured well.
If a site is hosted in the USA or Europe it costs the ISPs US$750 per megabit per second to download websites, which they then show their clients.
Locally hosted content is free for them to access, no matter which network the content is hosted on. Currently, the ISPs are pocketing the difference, but the potential of having even cheaper rates for content that is hosted locally are quite amazing.
The trigger for Battenberg’s search engine he said was a copy of Wikipedia he was hosting locally. The copy is static, you cannot search it. “So I decided to make it searchable and after it finally worked, I was like why don’t we do the entire Ugandan Internet,” he said.
The search engine, which started as a weekend hobby has taken him a few months to create and he did this over the weekends. “Using the free Internet crawler Nutch, I developed the search engine,” Battenberg said.
When Ugandans or Africans host websites in Europe or the US, it keeps the knowledge and skills outside there, yet if the reverse was true and those servers were managed here, local ICT professionals would earn a living, which is a good thing for the economy.
From a user perspective, the search engine is all about Uganda and the speed of the network is really important. Battenberg said he does not know of a local website in Kenya or Tanzania that is indexing local content.
Mountbatten’s core business is building intelligent websites for any type of customer; provide local hosting services and training. “We also foster discussion by raising a few issues on topical ICT matters and that helps create awareness of ICT's potential,” Battenberg said.
Asked why he developed this search engine, Battenberg said, it helps to promote the use of local content, which in the end is good for everyone in the ICT field and for the people who surf the internet, which hopefully soon, will be almost everyone.