Connect with us

Uncategorized

Telecom Revolution is Key Driver of Development-Ndukwe

Published

on

Kindly share this post

Ernest Ndukwe, executive vice chairman and chief executive officer, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) is a professional engineer with over 28 years of local and international experience. The NCC he is leading has completely transformed the country’s telecom landscape with the now world famous revolution which ahs placed phones on the hands of Nigerians and connected many nconnected. He spoke about the revolution and next big thing in this interview with Ken Nwogbo.

 

Prediction on Telecom Revolution

Looking back, nobody could have predicted the amount of success that has been recorded in the industry. Remember that we started from a very low level and almost zero-subscriber level compared to what we have today. We had just over 20,000 wireless mobile line and 200,000 fixed lines – hardly anything for anyone to care about. But over the years, we have seen this growth to the level that by the end of July, 2008 we have netted 58 million connections and there was no way we could have predicted this in 2001 when this journey started. But it has been a pleasant development and we thank God for his favours and for what He has enabled us to do in this area.

Growth in Subscriber Base and Capacity

The capacity is also growing. The problem actually comes from where we started. Most countries that transited from wireline infrastructure as their base and moved to mobile already had very good wire line infrastructure. That is why I laugh when people compare Nigeria with places like the UK, the U.S and some European countries. These are countries that had very good landline infrastructure. The incumbent operators in those places had obligation to make sure that lines were available to all people in the country no matter their location. But the situation we found ourselves in here in Nigeria from 1960 at independence until recently was that lines were growing in the country at an average of 10,000 lines per annum. Today we are talking about 1.2 million lines per month, so you can see the difference. In terms of capacity, let me say that all the operating companies are installing capacities at such a fast rate and within the possibilities available to the environment. One of them recently said that in the month of July, they had about 150 base stations – that is definitely a record. Most people do 30, 50, at the best, 100 – that will show you how much capacity that is put into the network in order to enhance it. I am sure what you will also be saying is that they do not have headway in their capacity to be able to take anything that is out of the ordinary and I will agree with you on that. That is why when they try to offer free calls at a particular weekend, the whole network gets jammed. So if we start from a very shallow base and start building the network to what it is today, for the whole country to be covered, for enough base stations to be available everywhere and for us to now have that critical headway that will make it possible for us to handle extraordinary occurrences so that networks are not thrown into any form of confusion. But today, capacity is growing rapidly.

Broadband and Mobile Growth

It would never be possible for broadband and fixed lines to keep pace with the mobile growth. I say that because when you look at what happened in the years when fixed lines infrastructure was in vogue – in the 60s, 70s and 80s before mobile services became widespread, Nigeria did not take advantage of that period and most of Africa did not. Today, to build a landline infrastructure, you need permission; you need approval from local and state government and that may be delayed. Secondly, it takes more time to build a fixed line infrastructure unlike that of mobile. For fixed line/wire line, you have to draw cable on individual basis to the various targets where you have your customers. So, it is a difficult thing to do in a fast manner. That is why I said it would be impossible for fixed lines to catch up with mobile lines because of the nature of deployment. What we should be talking about is how much we can improve on it. Even in this age of fixed mobile substitution, you find some people (especially young people) abandoning the fixed lines in preference for the mobile lines, so that they can stay connected in their offices, homes, anywhere they are without restrictions. I think the challenge from your question is – how do we further improve the penetration of broadband in Nigeria? We are working on that and companies are gearing up to provide broadband internet services in the country.

Impact of Financial Sector in Telecom Revolution

The telecom revolution has been a major driver of development in the country in the past seven years. It has affected nearly all other sectors of the economy – the financial sector, business community, government services, security services, medical services, legal services. All these have been impacted positively by the telecom industry. The advertising companies have never known it so good, telecom has suddenly become a major (if not the primary) contributor to advertising in the country. When we look at the ordinary businessman, people are able to use their phones to reach their customers and run their businesses more efficiently. It has improved commerce and industrial development; it has improved interactions – doctors today do not need to be glued to a particular location when they are on call; they can be on the move and still be on call in a hospital and can attend to emergency cases regardless of their locations. So all these have been major contributions of the telecoms industry, a major facilitator of growth in the national economy.

Revenue from in 7 Years

What I can say is that investment in the industry is over $12 billion. I mean all forms of investment in the telecoms industry – licensing, roll out of networks, investment in various companies. So it is over $12 billion.

Consumer Parliament as Alternative Dispute Resolution

The consumer parliament has been a major factor on the Nigerian telecoms scene. What it has done is empower the consumer more. We pride ourselves for raising consumer awareness to a higher level in the country today. Before the telecom parliament, most consumers in the country were basically left in the dark and not used to complaining. We have demonstrated that we can transparently meet the consumers and discuss with them on the issues and problems they have. This was never happening in this country, most people hardly complained – they did not have a say. But the consumer parliament and consumer-based programmes have given the consumers a new voice and we very happy for that. Right now, we are looking at bringing out the education part of the consumer parliament because what people don now is just come and make complaints and their complaints are discussed; we listen to their grievances. But we want to go beyond that; we want to use it as a platform for consumer education and awareness as a veritable tool in the hands of the consumers to be able to assist them evaluate services offered by operating companies and be able to make fine decisions on their own. So that is what we want to do with parliament.

Addressing Issues of Quality of Service

Yes, the quality of service situation has been topical because of this consumer awareness that we have instilled. In terms of quality, the commission has done a lot in addressing the issue of getting quality of service here to meet international standards. That is why recently, we published a few things on key issues in the industry addressing questions like congestion, call related problems and others. Operators of telecoms should ensure that they meet minimum quality of service requirements and we have also committed that when they fail, we will ensure that they pay the consumers in compensation. If you noticed, for the first time in the African continent, the telcos are paying compensation to the consumers for poor service rendered. So we are working hard at it and we hope that they continue to improve in quality. The heat is on and we know that there is a lot of installations going on in the various networks and this will over time enable them provide an optimum quality of service in the environment.

Hosting Commonwealth Telecom Organization Forum

The Commonwealth Telecom Organization normally has annual meetings and the venue moves from one country to another. The one two years ago was in Malta, last year’s was in Jamaica. It was during the Jamaican conference that Nigeria indicated interest in hosting this year’s Annual General Meeting. So, it is something that countries hold on rotational basis. CTO has been an important organization in developing ICT across the Commonwealth countries. Apart from the Annual General Meetings which is usually a one day or two day affair, CTO’s tradition has it that together with the AGM is a forum which targets discussions on very topical issues in the ICT industry. So, the CTO forum will hold from the 6th – 9th of October and then on the 10th, we will have the Annual General Meeting. It is an important event and we will be hosting a number of ministers from various Commonwealth countries. The acting chairman of CTO is a regulator from Uganda. Usually, CTO is headed by chief executives of various regulatory bodies around the Commonwealth. The organization is solely handled by the Commonwealth Telecom Organization office but here, there is also a local organizing committee that would see to the preparations – It is going to be a major event.

Next Big Thing in the Industry

We have not really done enough in the broadband area so; the next big thing for this country is broadband where we will good Internet connectivity in the country. We are licensing some companies to roll out broadband services in the State capitals and commercial centers across the country. Another big thing is to ensure that services are extended to rural areas – reaching the unreached.

 


Kindly share this post

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek believes that technology makes life more exciting and helps improve the lives of people around Nigeria and indeed the world. So since 2007, we have devoted our energy to independent reportage of technology and how they affect lives.

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Comments

Uncategorized

Our 2023 Ads Safety Report

Published

on

Kindly share this post

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.


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

InDrive Upgrades App, Announces New Safety Details

Published

on

Kindly share this post

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.


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Uncategorized

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

Published

on

Kindly share this post

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.

 

 

 

 


Kindly share this post
Continue Reading

Trending