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Social, Political Interference Harmful to Telecom Business

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Gbenga Adebayo, president of Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria (Alton) is an authority in the telecom industry. A former general manager of VGC Communications and now managing director, CNSS, telecom outsourcing company bares his mind on the industry in this interview with chike onwuegbuchi and hilary okeke.

 

Local Content and Operators

On local content, you can view it from two different angles: angle one, talking in terms of hardware; the second one, being in terms of human capital.

When people talk about local content, what really comes to mind is the hardware component; how many of those products and services are made in Nigeria? How many of those brands are Nigerian? That’s what people really interpret as local content. In reality, when you look at ICT being as global industry, local content goes beyond hardware. There is no individual country in the world today that provides the component or content required for a full IT based infrastructure and therefore, countries are interdependent in terms of manufacture and production of various elements of IT based infrastructure. You might be an expert in the production of certain devices and tools; the software might be provided to you, the hardware might be from another manufacturer and country. So, it’s very difficult to find one country that has all that’s required for a full blown communication infrastructure. This means that countries will continue to be interdependent on one another.

And again, there’s no individual country that’s self-sufficient, even the super-powers still depend on certain input from certain countries. Our problem is that nothing is made here. When you look at what makes up a full blown mobile network, copper infrastructure is almost insignificant. What is relevant in our case which will prepare us for the future is the content in terms of human capital. How many of our people are holding authoritative positions in the ICT industry? If they are not prime movers today, if they are not playing critical role today, what is the plan to have Nigerians take over those positions after a period of time?

Poor Quality of Service and Growth Telecom

You see, quality of service can be addressed in many ways and I speak now as the chairman of the operators association that the problem encountered by every sector of the economy, is also facing telecom service provider and because it is all network in one network, there are so many dependencies. So, part of the factors responsible for quality of service is the failure of the Nigerian socio-economic-infrastructure; talking about security, energy, good road network, availability of statistical data, import regulation, import duty, clearing problems at the port, issues of multiple taxation, interference by agencies of government and so on. However, as a people we should not forget our history; we have a network that’s less than 10 years, starting point was half a million subscribers; within 10 years 40 million subscribers and those are networks driven by physical infrastructure.

Revival of Nitel

The case of Nitel is very unfortunate because today, there wouldn’t have been telecom in Nigeria without Nitel. Nitel provided the platform for every service provider in this country today. The question now is how come the one that played such a legacy role has become the one that plays behind the scene? That’s the question I keep asking. In spite of the infrastructure of Nitel, in spite of the greatness of the potentiality of Nitel, in spite of the mileage of Nitel as regards the coverage of this country. There’s no part of the country that you go to today that you don’t see the footprint of Nitel; be it in the form of an old analogue exchange, be it in the form of an old cellular exchange or the form of a receiver station. I was not at that press conference because I have not been around, I have not been following the reports on this issue but it co-relates with what I said earlier. It looks like many things were not done rightly; perhaps the sale was done in a hurry, perhaps there were issues with the bidding processes, perhaps there was an issue with the disclosure element; otherwise, to me as an analyst, it looks like Transcorp met more than they prepared for on one side. To me as an analyst with due respect to all players, it looks like government did not provide the right environment for the buyers of Nitel to succeed. The concern therefore is that if Transcorp paid what it paid for Nitel, which in some quarters have been said is too high and in some quarters too low, no matter what; if factors militating against their success are not dealt with, no matter who buys Nitel tomorrow, the same thing will happen. So, there are some fundamental issues that should be addressed on the part of Nitel. If government has decided to sell Nitel, they should do that with a plain mind. They should not sell it on one side and tie it down on the other side. It will kill the company. We all blame Transcorp for Nitel’s failure without stopping to look at the basic issues there. The case of Transcorp is something that must be addressed with plain mind. Government must be honest about it and of course, they owe the public some explanations on why certain things went the way they did with Nitel. It got to a point where Nitel couldn’t even pay its wages. There’s more to it and am saying again, if factors that led to inability of Transcorp to deliver NITEL are not dealt with precisely, rightly and honestly, same thing will happen again. And again I maintain ‘government still owes the public some explanations on what happened there. So, on that note I would say that we cannot isolate the government from what happened to Nitel. The records are there, allow Nitel to make public names of people who owe them. I believe that with the right support to the buyers of Nitel, the potentials of Nitel are going to manifest.

CNSS and Outsourcing

It is a common practice all over the world. You can not keep all needed skills or all operations in-house. There is no individual company that can provide all its requirements in all areas; it is becoming more popular because the networks are growing and they need to turn around service delivery since it is on high demand. What you will see in the future is the outsourcing of airtime; you will begin to see virtual operators who will not be licensed holders, who will not be service operators; who will sell the services of licensed operators. It’s already happening in other parts of the world. And so what we do in CNSS is to strategically position ourselves to be able to provide rightful engineering outsource support for network operators.

Non individual service providers can provide all the necessary resources to drive a network. It is a case of individual companies building the infrastructure and leasing to service providers. It is a common practice in industries of developed countries and I see it as a good feature. For example, today the challenges that are faced by a number of our members include access to site, security and maintenance of site. If the site is owned by a third party, it is the obligation of that owner to ensure uninterrupted availability of service. Certain burdens are taken off the back of service providers and so they can face expansion, organization of quality, provision of value added services and so on. Am glad that the industry is opening up to outsourcing and I believe it will help in its development and sustainability. Even the roads are outsourced-government gives them to people to maintain so that they are not abused and that’s evident in developed countries.

Number Portability

No, that is not correct. We have made public statements that number portability is accepted. Number portability is something we know, it is a common practice all over the world, it is a feature that can be supported by networks. But we have said that the approach to the introduction of number portability cannot be done on the pages of the newspaper; it must be all inclusive because at the end of the day, it is all networks in one network and we do expect that there’ll be stakeholders’ involvement-every participant, every stakeholder, every operator in the industry will have a role to play in this process. There’s the commercial, engineering and also the administrative part and all should be at work to make this a reality. This is not something that should be jumped into; we must plan and work together-operators, regulators and the consumers. Also, there’s an associated cost in providing number portability. It’s not something you just dump on service providers; everyone has a business plan. As an association, we’ve expressed interest, it’s a feature that’s come to stay; we’ve agreed to go with it and it needs to be given the right approach.


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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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