The light pipes under our feet

In most corporations, people, communication and knowledge are few clicks away. Clients and service providers no longer have to be on the same location because of the availability of fiber optic. Fiber connections allowed vendors and clients to transmit data and enjoy instantaneous communication from different parts of the world.

Apparently, use of fiber emerged in 1980s, solving a major problem of signal degradation/loss experienced when working with copper to transfer data over networks.  Copper networks needed repeaters to boost their signals after a distance of 100m, approximately 320 feet. For instance it would be 4 - 8 times (copper 1000mbps, fiber 4 – 8gpbs) faster to back up data from a server to a SUN unit with fiber connectivity.

This means with the speed of 4 – 8gpbs, an equivalent of 25000 pictures or 25 hours of video will be backed up faster on a fiber based than copper network.

Now, everyone will agree we need a strand of one “light Pipe” to our houses or offices, I mean who doesn’t love high internet speeds, transmitting gigabytes of files in seconds or perhaps buffering online videos in a flash! If we really have this appetite for fiber then why don’t we fully utilize this capacity of data at our disposal? 

In January 2011, Rwanda completed work on its 2,300 km cable at a cost of $60 million, Korea Telecom laid the fiber. Tanzania is still working on their 10,000 km cable at a cost of approximately $170 million; Burundi on the other hand got a grant of $10.5 million to lay 1300km of cable. Uganda too acquired a Chinese loan of about $102 million to lay 2100 km long of cable.  Compared to the four countries, Kenya’s private sector has been on the fore front of laying fiber in the country, by June 2010, they had laid 5000km of cable; the government is also investing $60 million in a fiber cable of its own.

These five partners have invested in terrestrial fiber optic to build a large interconnected region on the continent. With all these cables do we have enormous data capacity to utilize them or local telecom companies just installed extra strands in metropolitan areas as a concern against future capacity shortages? Or did the private sector especially in Kenya invest too much to prepare for the much anticipated internet explosion which has led to the growth of dark fiber in the country that is not lit (industry jargon for operating).

What happens to the unlit strands! What if they become obsolete before we completely utilize them? Think about the much turbulence of technology, innovation of lasers that will definitely leap beyond the capabilities of already installed fibers. Let’s hope businesses will grow and more fiber capacity will be needed, at that time the unlit fiber will be used to sustain the next wave of growth.

Green electronics

The explosion of high tech laptops, notebooks, smartphones, tablets and other ‘toys’ is creating a worrying trend to the environment conservationists – electronic scrap or what is now being referred to as ‘e-waste’.

Newer, faster and more efficient gadgets are being introduced at a very fast pace. How long do you stay with your old device before catching up with new technology? Three years? Eight? Once you upgrade and get a newer device, how do you dispose of your old one?

Once thrown in the garbage, electronics are collected and trashed at dumpsites, where they are smashed, burned until everything that was once safely ensconced inside spills out and over the course of months, years, and decades, moves into the air, ground, and water.

For instance, in Accra children smash up old computers, tare them apart then burn them to reveal the wires inside. They would later sell these wires to metal buyers as copper. These children got sick, vomited and experienced headaches due to fumes from the burning wires. After which, ashes containing lead, a neurotoxin and cadmium which damages lungs and kidneys is littered on the ground and washed away to the ocean when it rains.

When a single cellphone lies around on the ground, is not a concern. But when billions of these are disposed, they tend to release large doses of chemicals (like Colton in cellphones) to the ground which becomes a health hazard. Critical health concerns such as cancer have been linked to this, for example premature aging and defected damaged genes caused by chemicals which altered DNA structure of workers in China.

In Kenya e-waste is piling up though not as much as in the US, due to the way old and unloved electronics are handled locally. For instance, institutions like “Computer for Schools Kenya” in collaboration with the city council of Nairobi started a plant to recycle old CRT monitors as a way of managing e-waste.

The number of cellphones and PCs that are trashed is overwhelming, mostly cellphones because Kenyan market is flooded with lots of Chinese models that are cheap and tossed once they get spoilt, same to PCs.

Initially before the world environmental laws from organizations like “Greenpeace international” stood firm to control e-waste, there existed unregulated trade in dumping electronics. This is when electronic corporations like Nokia, started making durable handsets that are free from brominated compounds, chlorinated flame retardants and antimony trioxide. Some of the other corporations include Samsung, Phillips, Apple, Sony among others.

Ultimately, Kenya begins to understand the dangers that come from hazardous materials which lay inside electronics. In 2010, Hewlett Packard made a move and established the HP East Africa Computer Recycling plant in Kenya. Located in Mombasa, this facility assesses IT waste for re-use and refurbish if appropriate. The long-term aim of the facility is to capture up to 20 per cent of IT e-waste in Kenya.

In Kenya, the National Environmental Management Association (NEMA) drafted laws in 2008 to guide against e-waste in the country. Since then, citizens have been patronized to have strong green principles towards e-waste from conferences and seminars organized by the body with support from the government.

In order to reduce e – waste in the country, a second solution calls for users to sell their used up but functioning electronics on online classified ad sites, or donate them to a responsible local charity or organization. Navtej Dhadialla, an Apple maniac from CIO East Africa, disposes his old gadgets by selling them off to local stores.

VSAT still a resource in Africa

The entry of fiber optic networks has led to shrinking of business in VSAT technology in Kenya. Fiber connectivity has increased internet speeds on traditional terrestrial networks to an extent of having an over capacity on the same.

High speed direct fiber to organizations has led them to invest less on VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminal) and concentrate more on the affordable terrestrial WAN links. VSAT has been initially used for remote weather forecasting, broadcasting etc. Well, today VSAT technology is still in business, their networks offer up to 99.4% uptime for major companies like airlines and banks.

Why organizations still depend on VSAT.

Realiabilty

Airports and the Kenya navy cannot fully relay on fiber and WIMAX connectivity due to their down time. Fiber connectivity has upto 84% of uptime; therefore it means at some point 16% of this connectivity will be down.  This latency is not allowed due to the nature of business run by these institutions.

VSAT networks are recommended for mission critical applications. When their links are down, it’s easy to troubleshoot the problem because of the nature of their laid infrastructure, the problem either lies on the sending station, the satellites or the receiving station. This compared to a fiber cut, which will take time to locate and replace the cables for the link to be up again. 

Back up to terrestial networks

Many banks in East Africa have branches in rural areas; these numerous branches connect to servers at their head offices. VSAT provides connectivity in sparsely populated rural areas where terrestrial networks like fiber are expensive to install due to the cabling involved and installation of many base stations (BTS).

In as much as banks use the terrestial networks, these lines cannot achieve 100% uptime. VSAT hence provides standby emergency back-up services. When the terrestial networks experience downtime, banks can purchase bandwith exclusively for backup then dynamically distribute them to branches experiencing a down time. VSAT provides bandwidth up to 2 mbps downlink and 512 kbps uplink high speed internet access for temporary emergency situations.

Security

Government mandate, states that its information should be carried on secure networks.

As part of Kenya’s technological evolution, the government has been working towards streamlining the voting system into a more efficient and effective electoral process. It was a successfully implementation of an electronic voter registration and voter tallying system, to cater to the Kenyan constitution referendum voting process. The system though was only on pilot stage in preparation for the 2012 general elections.

The Interim Independent Electoral Commission (IIEC) needed to implement a system that would rapidly, reliably and credibly transfer data from each polling station nation-wide, to their tallying centre. Satelite communication becomes a desirable way to send this information in future elections.

Satellites support encryption of all data transmitted between two sites or multiple sites, which make the creation of Virtual Private Networks (VPN) possible. VPNs use “virtual” secure networks that are connected through public networks (like the internet) to remote sites.  With this, VSAT networks find more acceptances in government and defense connectivity because anyone who incepts the data cannot decrypt it for malicious use.

Inter-operation with other terrestrial networks i.e. WIMAX, fiber networks

Through partnerships with local terrestrial service providers, VSAT service providers are getting stronger in comprehensive network provision and management.

They can offer, for example, MPLS networks in metro areas and VSAT networks in the rural areas for the same company – both of them can inter-operate with each other acting as a single network!

An example, Alldean Satellite Networks, a Kenyan satellite service provider offering both domestic and cross-border connectivity to virtually anywhere in Africa, they have done cellular backhaul projects for major telcos in the counrty.

VSAT in Africa

In Africa, organizations are still using VSAT networks to control their operations and other services. For example Alldean networks, a local VSAT provider offers its services to local banks, the government and they were behind the set up of communication links in one of the major airport in the country.

In addition, customers can now send money directly to the mobile “wallets” of Safaricom M-PESA subscribers in Kenya from 45 countries and territories. The expansion of the service to more than 80,000 locations worldwide is based on the VSAT network communication technology.

On the 4^th – 7^th of July, 2011, the “Broadcast, Interactive, Internet and Hybrid TV in Africa” conference will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa. As industry leaders from all over the world gather together to understand the latest innovations in TV, satellite remains the backbone and has a bigger foot print in TV broadcasts. This shows that the communication technology is still in business.

Why KNEC should look at their servers!

When the Kenya National Examination Council (KNEC) released the 2010 examination results late February this year, my kid brother spent lots of money trying to access his results from a cyber in town. The KNEC portal took time to load and display the results, Ian turned to sending an SMS request on the same, in vain.

The council so far has done well by keeping abreast with technology solutions to deploy exam results via their website and the short message service. Despite this bright initiative by KNEC to increase efficiency in results collection by former candidates, their systems fail when a number of requests are sent to the servers at that specific time.

This however is not the first time former candidates experience this problem, it has been an issue over the years since KNEC implemented this response system. Let us have a look as to why this happens and possible solutions that can be implemented to address the problem.

Server optimization

KNEC provides examination results in two major ways, i.e. either students access them on their website or send request messages to their servers.  Well, SMS becomes the better option because of accessibility to internet facilities might be hard in some parts of the country. Though, this becomes a tricky affair, why! Because service providers only lease bandwidth for SMS transmission, they are not really involved with how the servers synchronize these lines of passage.  

Therefore the SMS system does not carry the blame as much other than proper management of this traffic which mainly involves having sufficient bandwidth to do so.

The real issue here again lies on their servers; KNEC should conduct a proper optimization of their database systems for these new result outlets to work efficiently.

Scalable shared hosts

Take an example of Amazon S3 and Media Temple VPS server facilities. These two have ability to serve replies to thousands of result requests simultaneously hence without any delays.

As everything boils down to the KNEC servers, I believe they are on a shared host that is not scalable under heavy load. My take, the council should operate scalable servers which have virtual storage spaces where by when new data is moved on the private servers, it replaces the old data which then can be stored in web based support hosted on local servers.

Sensible dedicated virtual servers

A clear picture on the fundamentals of this issue; All the other modules of the KNEC website excluding the examination results database occupies a few megabytes, lets says 30MB on the higher level.

A MySQL database with 360,000 records, a rough estimate of candidates who sit for KCSE examination each year gets to occupy around 30GB of the storage system.

When we compared KNEC servers with what MediaTemple as an example, http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/dv/ are offering as a dedicated virtual server is imaginable. Not only is it efficient but the capacity is enormous too. For USD 150 per month the council gets 100 GB of hard disk space, which in this case it can hold 30 years of student’s records inclusive of other modules of the website.

Narrowing down to the random memory (RAM) capacity needed, MediaTemple offers 2GB RAM for this package, and considering a complex web script only operates comfortably with 4MB of RAM capacity.

KNEC claims that the problem lies with heavy SMS traffic experienced during core times when they release results. According to our analysis, this problem is accounted to a bracket of issues, not only the clogged traffic but also server optimization problems. Relating back to my example as they claim; MediaTemple package includes 2TB (Terebyte) of bandwidth capacity to carry SMS while each SMS request needs only a KB of the bandwidth.

When it comes to cost it’s a whole point all together, let’s do the math; the cost of hosting this service at MediaTemple is USD 150 a month, when we convert to Kenyan Shillings it means out of the 360,000 possible text request, 12000 requests covers the cost of hosting KNEC services in these efficient servers. This is when the council charges KSH 10 for every SMS exam result request send by a former student.

Loosing brand power in social media sphere

A simple description of Facebook, Twitter, My Space, LinkedIn or Flickr collectively, can be refered to internet and mobile based publishing technologies that allow individuals to share information in various forms with each other and the general public.

Soon enough as social media keeps dominating business communication; it is growing and follows the e-commerce evolution. Despite this new age of conversing, social media is not a piece of cake, there are many risks that prevail an organization as employees engage in using Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn among other social interractive online forums.

Problem at hand, Is your brand at risk

The ever increasing adoption of social media by business also begs the question: What if any legal risks are attached to social media adoption by an enterprise.

In as much as a good percentage of individuals perceive business outreach via social media networks boosts devotion and improves customers’ loyalty to a company. Though, lack of formal guidelines on the way employees interact with the social media may have serious repucursions.

On an international view, social media presents two general threats to enterprises -- phishing attacks and disclosure of intellectual property, said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at San Francisco-based nCircle Inc.

As pressure builds from multiple fronts. Sales and marketing teams want to engage and sell to customers through social computing. Users want more freedom to access personal accounts from the workplace. HR teams want to be able to recruit, hire and retain social media-savvy employees, yet they might not be aware of the risks involved in engaging with these forums.

Some of the risks involved include loss of reputation and possible liable suits when employees blab or posts photos and videos about what they shouldn't. There are also risks of malware attacks, identity theft, phishing and privacy breach of sensitive data.

A practical example of Telcom limited in South Africa, suffered the rath of customers hate site actions. Due to monopolizing the telecommunication industry, the company handled its customers in a bad way. They responded by creating a page “Telkom hellcom” that ruined the company’s reputation.

Individuals can also masquerade as companies or people on social media sites and put out false messaging that is interpreted by the public as being real. This can affect stock prices and it can impact what shareholders think of a company thus impacting investment and the bottom line.

Lots of inappropriate information is passed in these environments that might cost organization image. According to Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit in 2010, business managers should be held responsible for security in social media forums and not the IT department.  

Governing social media, get involved, share and apologize

In East Africa, Millward Brown, a global research company carried a research on 25 coporate companies on what policy measures they have taken when interacting in the social forums. None of them have written policies in place to govern the use of social media.

Organizations should make sure that the corporate communication policy not only covers the media and press, but also social networking. Though, many East African companies have tried wholesale blocking of these sites.

By doing this on corporate PCs obviously doesn't prevent anyone from using alterative means, to go out and make the same outrageous mistakes that could harm the company.

This however is a temporary solution because according to Millward Brown research statistics, the social way of sharing information is growing at an alarming rate.

Social media is rewriting the rules of IT security and changing the security perspective of enterprises. The way these communication forums are packaged, it is very hard to control data breeches like in case of emails. Enterprises can only counter this by responding positively to what customers say about them.

Due to the sophisticated techniques of securing social media content that arent fully effective, employees must understand what confidential data is. So when they are on these sites, they understand the ramifications of what they are doing.

Mobile money transfers, hackers homework!

Recently I happened to attend the launch of an Ethical Hacker training programme that was introduced in the Kenyan market by EC-Council and SIMOS Consultancy firm. What really attracted my attention is the way various security ethusiats talked about numerous angles of breaches that we face especially with the consumerization of tech products that we engage in due to increased internet connectivity.

Am not talking about individual people but also companies and organizations have trusted this systems to build their brands and run their business on. To some it is unavoidable especially the telcoms with their numerous services and as they try to reduce the amount of liquid cash we carry in our pockets.

What am i driving at, for instance are the numerous amounts of monies sitting in the cloud platforms during various exchanging systems owned by Kenyan telcoms? For example the MPESA, YuCash, Zap and OrangeCash, how secure are these amounts of cash lying in this space! And how long will it take for black cyber criminals to hit on us?

Let me be a little bit technical, we have all used celphones, at some point between our conversations; we experience noise (technical interruption of communication signals). When this happens, the transeivers try to reconstruct this message and at this period is when our conversations are tapped by external listeners. Now think about what happens when subscribers try sending money between this communication channels and this happens!

Mobile money actually has brought a huge change in the way we transfer cash from one place to the other. Our sim cards have become money wallets but again will these send hackers back to books on how to best they can have Kenyan money sitting in simcards and hovering all over the space!

…I don’t trust Wezesha laptops deal...

Thanks to the ICT government intiative of giving a helping hand to the university & college students a chance of embracing the digital world. Wezesha is a bright idea; I mean soft loans for me to get a laptop, who would refuse. Funded by the World Bank this is a brilliant take that brings up a technology oriented person as he/she narrows in to specific disciplines of undergraduate studies.

As a tech ethusiast I took a step ahead and did some math, clearly something aint right. Am not just being paranoid about stuff but lets look at the calculations.

We analysized the laptops available in this deal and noticed some 'anomalies';

For instance, the Samsung N150 is stated as costing KES 19,100 courtesy of Safaricom, but the same on the Safaricom Shop goes for KES 29,999, a difference of KES 10,899. Now, the voucher given to students is worth KES 9,600...

And then this HP Compaq CQ56-152si costs KES 41499 via the program but a similar of its kind with the same specifications on chekelea.com costs KES 41,440! 

This Toshiba Satellite C660-1EL costs KES 40,999 with the voucher while the same costs KES 39,760 without the voucher.

I would say my fellow tech analyst and I arent money minded but lets have a clear picture of things.