Prometheus 6   

Searching for a Dial Tone in Africa
By G. PASCAL ZACHARY

… Calls in and out of sub-Saharan Africa have long been among the world's most costly, strangling business opportunities and burdening ordinary people. Services have been tightly controlled by government-owned telephone companies, many of which are rife with corruption and incompetence. Governments also imposed high tariffs on international calls, seeing it as a lucrative source of revenue.

But now, thanks to what is called voice-over-Internet, phone alternatives are flourishing, sharply lowering costs and expanding opportunities for business and consumers in some of the poorest places on earth � even as they pose a competitive threat to government-sanctioned telephone companies.

Sending telephone calls over the Internet is gaining ground in Africa because it makes possible a range of new services, linking the sub-Saharan to the world's major industrial centers in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. And better digital connections, mostly via satellite, are raising the hope that Ghana � the most peaceful country in a West African region besieged by civil wars and ethnic strife � may become the regional hub for an information-technology industry.

As the movement advances, though, many government-owned telephone companies, which dominate wired service in most African countries, are fighting a rear-guard action.

Internet telephony "is presented as the salvation for business and society in Africa," said Oystein Bjorge, chief executive of Ghana's national telephone carrier. "It is not."

… Here in Ghana, the national phone company is waging a sporadic campaign against its own citizens who use the Internet to make or receive telephone calls from America and Europe, periodically turning off the lines of those suspected of doing so.

Three years ago, the government even jailed the heads of some of Ghana's leading Internet providers. Though later exonerated by a court, the dissidents fear another crackdown. "Internet telephony is changing the whole power structure," said Francis Quartey, chief technology officer of Intercom Data Network and one of those jailed. "The dangerous thing is that the power elite is responding out of fear and ignorance."