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No End User Want to Experience Down Time- Gbenjo

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\Sunday Gbenjo is the managing director of Totaltelecoms Solutions Limited with over two decade experience in the telecom industry. Gbenjo has worked with the Nigeria Naval Dockyard, Sam Telecommunications, Briscoe Telecoms and has attended various international and local seminars and exhibitions. He spoke to chike onwuegbuchi about issues service delivery in telecom space among others.

Security Solution    
The solution is so simple; remember it is more security inclined. If you deploy the equipment, let us say at a bank with 10 to 15 branches in Lagos and outside Lagos, whenever there is a crisis in any of the banks, all they need do is press a button. Once the button is pressed, the emergency alert system would be transferred to the headquarters either in Lagos or Abuja and everybody will know that branch ABC located on Enugu Road is having a problem. It ensures that the law enforcement agents are quickly brought into the scene not only that, all the necessary information the law enforcement agents need to arrest the situation would be available.
Now the system has been modified to show pictures of what is happening at the. In our case, distance is no barrier, which means that if you want to monitor a location in Kano or Abakaliki and the headquarters which happens to be the monitoring room is in Lagos, you can easily do it. Not only that, you have the benefit of listening to all conversations at the troubled spot. Day in day out, we keep upgrading it at the requirement of individuals or corporate organizations by customizing it into what they need. Most of these things work with wireless distribution and all that is needed is small equipment.
Competing with Other Tracking Systems
The market is so big to the extent that one technology complements another technology. You will find out that where our system is needed, GSM tracking system might not be the suitable option. We still see ourselves as contemporaries within the IT sector. For example, we have a tracking system that can make use of Global System for Mobile communications, Sim cards, likewise there are some tracking units they have which make use of Radio Frequency (RF) signals. It is a matter of symbiotic relationship. The market is huge, where we are talking about a population of 140 million or more people. There is sufficient room to accommodate whatever anybody is bringing into the market, it a matter of one trying to pitch a tent in the market. I might decide that my technology should be for the banks and if the banks are satisfied with my product, they will key into it. Someone else might say he wants to address construction companies as his first point of call in the tracking business. Nigeria has a huge market for whatever anyone wants to offer, instead of competing with one another we can come under an umbrella, exchange ideas like what is happening with the Association of Telecommunications Companies of Nigeria (Atcon). If someone comes to our company requesting for a solution we do not have, we should be free to refer the person to the company which specializes in the solution. 
Managing Different Authorized Dealership
Apart from Motorola, we are an authorized dealer to Codan, we are also an authorized dealer of Tramingo tracking system. We are currently working with about 10 to 12 agencies under the United Nations. An agency might request for tracking unit while another might request for Codan radio equipment. It is a matter of giving you what you requested for, and managing them is not so difficult. It is about creating separate units that will handle each of the products. We have well trained engineers in data transfer equipment even up to factory level on Motorola equipment and Tramingo. Now we are going into surveillance radar system whereby we bring in what is called City Watch. I can be at Victoria Island and still watch what is going on in different parts of Lagos to ensure that security is provided for the rich, poor and everyone on the street. It is a matter of how the company is designed and how each of the units is put together.
Support for these Products and Solution
Any engineering firm either mechanical or telecom that wants to see beyond today must think about its product and what package it has in place for after-sale services. For instance, for Motorola products, before you are granted agency rights, they will ensure that you have competent engineers who have been well trained. Periodically, it is not a one-off training; it is a thing we do every six months. We also send them abroad for further training. All our equipment carries one to two years warranty and with that you should have adequate support otherwise you will keep changing equipment which might not be good for the business. At Totaltelecoms Solutions, after-sales service is our watch word. Most of the profit margin are from after-sales service so if we do not have competent engineers, the chances of we being efficient is not there. This time around time is money and no good end user will want to experience down time. Ours is to ensure that the down time of any equipment is minimal. Our after-sales service is valid and robust and we do not compromise standards.
Totaltelecom Solutions and Motorola
Totaltelecoms Solutions came into being about seven and a half years ago and right from inception, we have had a relationship with Motorola. Today as I am talking to you, we are ‘one tier representative in-country’ which means it is a total package. Total package comprises of marketing, integration, installation and consultancy. Before a company would be nominated to stand in for Motorola, it must have been well tutored and trained because what we do here locally is exactly what you get either in Chicago, Israel or wherever that kind of service is offered by Motorola. Apart from the Motorola representative that people know us with, we are also into system integration, bringing in new equipment, putting them together using our knowledge of engineering so that at the end of the day when Motorola sees some of the output of some of their products, they are amazed. This has happened several times. But you will find out that engineering in a global village now is more than doing jobs in the straight jacket the way it was brought from Chicago. Customers are becoming more and more sophisticated than what the manufacturers must have input into the system. It is now our obligation to ensure that we meet up with that challenge by adding extra value to customers.
Expansion Plan   
By February next year, we will open our Abuja office. We have about 30 dealers in Abuja who act as back- ups when we are not there. What we did was to train these selected dealers to position them to be able to offer after sale support our products they sale. We also have a liaison office in Port Harcourt which takes care of the South-South and South-East zones. Most of the jobs we do is unlike the GSM selling outlets where people have to see you. Trunking projects are up to about 100 to 120 million at a go, you will have to dialogue with customers, it takes time before they even put pen on paper and it is not something that happens every now and then. The equipment we deal in is more of safety, security, and industrial equipment; it is not something you can just pick from the street. We have to ensure that the organization we are working with has the necessary government regulatory approval documents. We have to check if you have the frequency license, if not we will have to link them with the Ministry of communication to ensure that the governmental aspect of the transaction is done before they can get back to us for deployment of the solution or products.

 


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Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

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By Duncan Lennox, VP & GM of Ads Privacy and Safety

Billions of people around the world rely on Google products to provide relevant and trustworthy information, including ads. That’s why we have thousands of people working around the clock to safeguard the digital advertising ecosystem. Today, we are releasing our annual Ads Safety Report to share the progress we’ve made in enforcing our advertiser and publisher policies and to hold ourselves accountable in our work of maintaining a healthy ad-supported internet.

The key trend in 2023 was the impact of generative AI. This new technology introduced significant and exciting changes to the digital advertising industry, from performance optimization to image editing. Of course, generative AI also presents new challenges. We take these challenges seriously and will outline the work we are doing to address them head-on.

Just as importantly, generative AI presents a unique opportunity to improve our enforcement efforts significantly. Our teams are embracing this transformative technology, specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), so that we can better keep people safe online.

Gen AI Bolsters Enforcement 

Our safety teams have long used AI-driven machine learning systems to enforce our policies at scale. It’s how, for years, we’ve been able to detect and block billions of bad ads before a person ever sees them. But, while still highly sophisticated, these machine learning models have historically needed to be trained extensively – they often rely on hundreds of thousands, if not millions of examples of violative content.

LLMs, on the other hand, are able to rapidly review and interpret content at a high volume, while also capturing important nuances within that content. These advanced reasoning capabilities have already resulted in larger-scale and more precise enforcement decisions on some of our more complex policies. Take, for example, our policy against Unreliable Financial Claims which includes ads promoting get-rich-quick schemes. The bad actors behind these types of ads have grown more sophisticated. They  adjust their tactics and tailor ads around new financial services or products, such as investment advice or digital currencies, to scam users.

To be sure, traditional machine learning models are trained to detect these policy violations. Yet, the fast-paced and ever-changing nature of financial trends make it, at times, harder to differentiate between legitimate and fake services and quickly scale our automated enforcement systems to combat scams. LLMs are more capable of quickly recognizing new trends in financial services, identifying the patterns of bad actors who are abusing those trends and distinguishing a legitimate business from a get-rich-quick scam. This has helped our teams become even more nimble in confronting emerging threats of all kinds.

We’ve only just begun to leverage the power of LLMs for ads safety. Gemini, launched publicly last year, is Google’s most capable AI modeI. We’re excited to have started bringing its sophisticated reasoning capabilities into our ads safety and enforcement efforts.

Our Work to Prevent Fraud and Scams

In 2023, scams and fraud across all online platforms were on the rise. Bad actors are constantly evolving their tactics to manipulate digital advertising in order to scam people and legitimate businesses alike. To counter these ever-shifting threats, we quickly updated policies, deployed rapid-response enforcement teams and sharpened our detection techniques.

  • In November, we launched our Limited Ads Serving policy, which is designed to protect users by limiting the reach of advertisers with whom we are less familiar. Under this policy, we’ve implemented a “get-to-know-you” period for advertisers who don’t yet have an established track record of good behavior, during which impressions for their ads might be limited in certain circumstances–for example, when there is an unclear relationship between the advertiser and a brand they are referencing. Ultimately, Limited Ads Serving, which is still in its early stages, will help ensure well-intentioned advertisers are able to build up trust with users, while limiting the reach of bad actors and reducing the risk of scams and misleading ads.

  • A critical part of protecting people from online harm hinges on our ability to respond to new abuse trends quickly. Toward the end of 2023 and into 2024, we faced a targeted campaign of ads featuring the likeness of public figures to scam users, often through the use of deepfakes. When we detected this threat, we created a dedicated team to respond immediately. We pinpointed patterns in the bad actors’ behavior, trained our automated enforcement models to detect similar ads and began removing them at scale. We also updated our misrepresentation policy to better enable us to rapidly suspend the accounts of bad actors.

Overall, we blocked or removed 206.5 million advertisements for violating our misrepresentation policy, which includes many scam tactics and 273.4 million advertisements for violating our financial services policy. We also blocked or removed over 1 billion advertisements for violating our policy against abusing the ad network, which includes promoting malware.

The fight against scam ads is an ongoing effort, as we see bad actors operating with more sophistication, at a greater scale, using new tactics such as deepfakes to deceive people. We’ll continue to dedicate extensive resources, making significant investments in detection technology and partnering with organizations like the Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Stop Scams UK to facilitate information sharing and protect consumers worldwide.

Investing in Election Integrity

Political ads are an important part of democratic elections. Candidates and parties use ads to raise awareness, share information and engage potential voters. In a year with several major elections around the world, we want to make sure voters continue to trust the election ads they may see on our platforms. That’s why we have long-standing identity verification and transparency requirements for election advertisers, as well as restrictions on how these advertisers can target their election ads. All election ads must also include a “paid for by” disclosure and are compiled in our publicly available transparency report. In 2023, we verified more than 5,000 new election advertisers and removed more than 7.3M election ads that came from advertisers who did not complete verification.

Last year, we were the first tech company to launch a new disclosure requirement for election ads containing synthetic content. As more advertisers leverage the power and opportunity of AI, we want to make sure we continue to provide people with the greater transparency and the information they need to make informed decisions.

Additionally, we’ve continued to enforce our policies against ads that promote demonstrably false election claims that could undermine trust or participation in democratic processes.

Overall 2023 Numbers

Our goal is to catch bad ads and suspend fraudulent accounts before they make it onto our platforms or remove them immediately once detected. AI is improving our enforcement on all these fronts. In 2023, we blocked or removed over 5.5 billion ads, slightly up from the prior year, and 12.7 million advertiser accounts, nearly double from the previous year. Similarly, we work to protect advertisers and people by removing our ads from publisher pages and sites that violate our policies, such as sexually explicit content or dangerous products. In 2023, we blocked or restricted ads from serving on more than 2.1 billion publisher pages, up slightly from 2022. We are also getting better at tackling pervasive or egregious violations. We took broader site-level enforcement action on more than 395,000 publisher sites, up markedly from 2022.

To put the impact of AI on this work into perspective: last year more than 90% of our publisher page level enforcement started with the use of machine learning models, including our latest LLMs. Of course, any advertiser or publisher can still appeal an enforcement action if they think we got it wrong. Our teams will review it and, in the cases where we find errors, use it to improve our systems.

Staying Nimble and Looking Ahead

When it comes to ads safety, a lot can change over the course of a year: the introduction of new technology such as generative AI to novel abuse trends and global conflicts. And the digital advertising space has to be nimble and ready to react. That’s why we are continuously developing new policies, strengthening our enforcement systems, deepening cross-industry collaboration and offering more control to people, publishers and advertisers.

In 2023, for example, we launched the Ads Transparency Center, a searchable hub of all ads from verified advertisers, which helps people quickly and easily learn more about the ads they see on Search, YouTube and Display. We also updated our suitability controls to make it simpler and quicker for advertisers to exclude topics that they wish to avoid across YouTube and Display inventory. Overall, we made 31 updates to our Ads and Publisher policies.

Though we don’t yet know what the rest of 2024 has in store for us, we are confident that our investments in policy, detection and enforcement will prepare us for any challenges ahead.


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InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

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InDrive, an e-hailing firm, announced app upgrades as well as new safety details for riders and drivers.

InDrive’s updated Safety Centre now allows its support team to contact a user’s trusted contacts in emergencies and the number of trusted contacts has been increased from one to five. InDrive says that it is also easier for its support team to share information with emergency services, among other things.

Also, the company said by clicking on the app’s SOS-button, users can see all the information needed when requesting help or reporting an incident – along with a button to call police or ambulance services.

InDrive’s app design has also been updated to improve user experience, making the Safety Centre more visible, it said.

Further, the company said: “inDrive is also testing photo sharing and automatic translation of chat messages, which have been added to the in-app chat function. These make it easier for the driver and rider to clarify the pickup point, and communicate in the same language while traveling.

“Passengers and drivers stay within the application when using these features, so there’s no need to use across other platforms, thereby protecting personal information. For now the feature is currently being tested by a limited number of users to improve its functionality before it is rolled out to everyone.”

The announcement today comes after the company recently revealed it had expanded its financing arrangement with General Catalyst to $146 million, allowing the company to engage in product upgrades, extend its service offerings, and enter new markets in Africa.


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NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

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Telecommunications operators in the country are gearing up for another round of disconnections of phone lines for subscribers who have failed to link their National Identification Numbers (NIN) with their SIM cards.

NIN-SIM Linkage: Telcos to Bar More Phones Lines from March 29

The disconnection which will happen Friday, March 29, following a directive from the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) requiring all registered SIMs lacking proper NIN linkage to be either corrected or completely disconnected from networks.

The ongoing process, which commenced on February 28, 2024, is part of the government’s efforts to curb criminal activities like banditry and kidnapping, contributing to enhancing national security.

There are indications of a potential third phase in April 2024.

Operators have reportedly cooperated with the NCC in executing the directive, affirming their commitment to national security objectives and assuring full compliance by the specified deadlines.

The second phase will target subscribers with five or more SIMs from a single operator lacking verified NIN-SIM linkages.

The third phase, set to commence on April 15, will focus on subscribers with four SIMs or fewer and unverified NINs.

While telecom companies seek a review and extension of the April deadline for the third phase, indications from the NCC suggest a steadfast adherence to the established timelines.

The first phase saw the barring of 40 million lines, comprising around 17 million active SIMs without NIN submissions and 23 million inactive SIMs lacking NINs over the past year.

 

 

 

 


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