The Computer Society of Kenya

Since 1986

wcitBusiness Daily Monday, December 17  2012

As Kenyans focused locally on political coalitions, marriages and divorces, governments convened and concluded a meeting in Dubai known as the World Conference on International Telecommunications, 2012. Governments were revising a 1982 Treaty, which describes how international telecommunication services will be governed over the next one to two decades.

ITUs role was best appreciated in 1970s through the 1980s & 1990s when telcos were largely government owned and by extension, the same governments as members of ITU would make binding decisions on how these telecommunication companies (e.g. the defunct Kenya Posts & Telecommunication Companies, KPTC) would interconnect internationally to others. ITU would therefore define the technical standards and protocols for the interconnection as well as the international charges.

Basically this meant that when a telephone call was made from London to Nairobi, it would mainly be originated by the government owned British Telecoms (BT) and would terminate onto the government owned KPTC network. The originator of the call, BT would then pay KPTC for terminating the call according to the widely cited “Sender-Pays” model. Needless to say, KPTC and other telcos in developing countries made billions of shillings.

So what has changed? The simple answer is the Internet. The Internet has changed the rules of the game. Majority of todays telephone calls, Voice over the Internet Protocol are carried over the Internet instead of the traditional, ITU defined protocols that carried voice communications.

On one hand, you have developing countries largely fronting for their telecommunication companies who have since lost a huge chunk of their revenues. On the other you have developed countries and governments fronting for Internet based companies making billions by transmitting voice communication over the Internet.

Everything was going as planned until Kenya declined to sign the Telecommunications Treaty. African countries demonised Kenya for failing to stand up for a chance to restore billions of shillings that used to be collected by the telcos.

Did Kenya win or lose at the WCIT 2012? Only time will tell, but for now, one can say that Kenya may have won a battle for the Internet community, but may have lost the war in as far as the regional, geo-political dimensions are concerned.

Share this page