Comments on: Tracking Mobile and Internet Services Across Africa

By: Selected Reading | The Bottom Billion Blog

Selected Reading | The Bottom Billion Blog — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:26:45 +0000

[…] week has seen the launch of a new information wiki, African Signals, from Eric Hershman of White African and Ushahidi. The […]

By: Posts about job as of May 9, 2009 | Shirasmane

Posts about job as of May 9, 2009 | Shirasmane — Sat, 09 May 2009 13:53:51 +0000

[…] […]

By: HASH

HASH — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 10:50:42 +0000

@Jeppe – Would love to get your input on TZ info onto African Signals. I just checked, and the site is up and running fine for me. If you still can’t get on, do let me know.

By: Jeppe

Jeppe — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:39:30 +0000

Hi,

Great site.
I am quite into the incredibly confusing price structures of Tanzanian ISP’s, and I’d like to add them on the African Signals site.
However, this eems to be offline?
Or – as I am on KU-band (Iway) and it is the rainy season – maybe I am offline 😀

I will be trying again later. if the site is in fact offline, please let me know so I am spared the endless frustration of teh 404…!

Cheers,

Jeppe
ICT Advisor
MS Tanzania

By: HASH

HASH — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 11:44:23 +0000

@jutta – I could put that in (and probably will), but the point is that you should put that info into the site instead. It’s really meant as a community resource that everyone contributes to.

By: Jutta

Jutta — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 01:36:10 +0000

I let you change the data on the other website. Concerning Mali: Ikatel is now Orange Mali. So you can take out Ikatel.
Malitel cell phone # start with 6
Orange land lines with 4
Orange cell phones with 7

By: katrin

katrin — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:23:30 +0000

@whiteafrican — I have my ways on getting my hands on data 🙂 Let’s just say beg, borrow, and steal….Some of it is public and we scraped it -ITU (or hover, as the British would say), some open APIs – World Bank and some where we are negotiating terms and costs right now because it’s proprietary (and not included on the list above) – GSMA and other data vendors. Ideally, we make this user-driven — you tell us what data you need as an implementer on the ground, and we try to get it.

As far as updating is concerned, depends on what the sources are and how often data is updated. The GMSA wireless intelligence service does it nightly, add quarterly earning reports from the operators, etc; other, such as the ITU is slower. MMetrics and Nielsen update theirs continuously, same with Jupiter etc. Nonprofit outlets like LIRNE Asia and Research ICT Africa have more aggregate data rather than country-by-country or operator-level data that they publish, though we are talking with them as well to determine how to work together.

On that note, I am hearing needs for these additional kinds of data points:

* Data costs per MB – on data plan or on off
* GPRS data coverage (operators have coverage maps but many are rather fictional)
* data on handsets by country – J2ME capable, android, GPRS enabled etc.

What else?

And we have this in an SQL database right now – to be published in a couple of weeks on the new mobileactive.org and to be amended as we get more access to critical data points.

Katrin, MobileActive.org

By: jke

jke — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:13:55 +0000

@Alex: Would you be willing to come up with such a database site for presenting the results? I think we’re still at stage 1 which includes the collection of such data from it’s users. Maybe the db system will be easier for users to know what data is sought for? But either way, I am just happy to see a site like this new wiki. I will link to it from my “How to use GPRS..”-posts.

On another note, I’d love to see a redesign of cd3wd.com into something that’s more visually appealing. You may know that we’ve in the past linked to your excellent site from AfriGadget.com and while having witnessed how for example the GATE publications were thrown away @GTZ in Eschborn after the project was stopped, all these orgs who are producing or financing manuals should (also) store it in a central file repository like cd3wd. Using social bookmarking services that just link to their resp. websites may also be the right way. But anyways, too off-topic right now…

@Erik: from a video podcast site to a wiki – not bad! Now we only need to figure out what to do with the other domains (e.g. afritwit.com etc.).

By: HASH

HASH — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:55:42 +0000

@Rob Allen and @Rob Worthington – That is exactly the changing type of data/info that is really only able to be tracked well in a collaborative wiki format. Take a look at what the Kenyans are doing so far with the different data options: http://www.africansignals.com/kenya:safaricom:safaricomhotspotpostpaid

That’s what type of granularity I hope to see, and change as the market changes.

By: HASH

HASH — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 05:53:12 +0000

@Alex – Excellent info. Think you can add it to http://www.africangsignals.com/zimbabwe and http://www.africangsignals.com/botswana ?