Archive for March, 2009
Ghana Telecom – job cuts
March 31st, 2009 | 
Author: The mobile market in parts of Africa is experiencing an unprecedented boom. From Egypt to South Africa and Nigeria to Kenya, growth is remarkable – despite the global economic downturn. However, some telcos are still overstaffed.
Overmanning is one of the last remaining legacies of the old, discredited, bureaucratic and inefficient state-owned model of telecoms provision that pertained in parts of Africa well into the mobile era.
Last summer, Vodafone spent US$900 million to acquire a 70 per cent stake in the west African state-controlled fixed line and mobile operator Ghana Telecom. The purchase caused a furore within the country. The government quickly approved the take-over but the political opposition were highly critical and claimed the deal had been rushed though with insufficient parliamentary oversight whilst the shares themselves were undervalued.
Now more than 20 per cent of the workforce at the carrier is to be cut with 850 out of 4,000 people being made redundant in what is, initially at least, a voluntary programme, in an effort to slim down the bloated staffing numbers to a level commensurate with a modern telco.
In a florid and adjective-laden posting on its Ghana Telecom’s website, Vodafone sugars what must be a bitter pill for what it coyly calls “disengaged staff” by self-referencing its “generous offer of voluntary disengagement” and access to a “customised Transition Support Programme” to help those made redundant “manage the change effectively as they seek different endeavours.”
The rate of unemployment in Ghana is believed to run in the mid 20 per cent range so such “different endeavours” might be hard to find.
Probably just as well then that “in accordance with Vodafone’s cherished values and best practice People Management Principles” (their capitals, not mine) those staff “disengaging” from the company “will be equipped with basic skills to plan and manage their personal finances better” whilst those “desirous of setting up their own businesses will be taken through basic entrepreneurial training.”
Ghana has a liberalised telecoms market and Ghana Telecom was privatised back in 1996 and it was run under a duopoly with Westel until early 2002. In addition to the national incumbent telco Ghana has four competing mobile networks iand mobile lines exceed fixed line availability by a ratio of 10:1.
Ghana has much untapped telecoms potential. Combined the fixed and mobile teledensity is at just over 15 per cent and, out of a population of twenty three and a half million just over 800,000 people have access to the Internet.
Posted in Communications | 
Tags: blog, blogs, business, Finance, Internet, Management, Mobile, Network | 
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UK – security risks from Chinese network equipment
China has the ability to shut down Britain’s vital services, including food or power supplies, because its companies are involved in upgrading telecommunications systems, according to intelligence officials.
Ministers have been warned that a new ?10bn communications network being developed by BT is vulnerable to a potential attack from within the Communist state because it uses equipment supplied by Chinese telecoms firm Huawei.
Although the risk of anyone in China exploiting the capability is currently low, intelligence experts believe the impact of any such attack would be very high. Computers at the Foreign Office and other Whitehall departments were attacked from China in 2007 and the threat from foreign governments and big companies is believed to be greater than that posed by terrorists.
Alex Allan, chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), it thought to have briefed members of the ministerial committee on national security about the threat from China at a Whitehall meeting in January. Ministers were told steps to curb the potential threat have made little difference.
Huawei is China’s biggest phone company and a major world supplier. Under a multi-million pound deal signed in 2005, it is providing key components for BT’s new ’21CN’ network which will use internet technology to speed up communications on behalf of thousands of public agencies and businesses.
Among those who will be relying on the new network are the government’s own intelligence agency GCHQ, Whitehall departments and the military.
BT would not comment on the issue and a Cabinet Office spokesman would only say the that government was working on ways to improve the security of Britain’s key systems. Huawei, whose UK division is based in Basingstoke, Hants, was unavailable for comment.
Ministers have been reluctant to replace Huawei with a British supplier, citing the cost and the government’s policy on competitive tendering for contracts.
The Whitehall meeting heard that Huawei components that form key parts of BT’s new network might already contain malicious elements that could be activated by China and which could “remotely disrupt or even permanently disable the network”, according to a report. Such action would have a “significant impact on critical services” such as power and water supplies, food distribution, the financial system and transport, which were dependent on computers using the communications network to operate.
Posted in Communications |
Tags: blog, blogs, business, Communications, Computer, Computers, Hackers, Internet, Network, system, Technology, world |
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IETF – examining new routing
see also Locator/ID Separation Protocol (LISP) draft-farinacci-lisp-12.txt
The IETF is forming a new working group to address scalability issues in the Internet’s routing system caused by companies splitting their network traffic over multiple carriers, a practice called multihoming.
The new working group will build upon a base proposal from a team of Cisco engineers to create a new tunneling mechanism that will be used by the Internet’s edge and core routers.
The new mechanism — dubbed LISP for Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol — is designed to reduce the number of entries in the routing tables stored in the core routers operated by ISPs.
LISP logically separates a block of IP addresses that a company advertises out to the global Internet via its edge routers into two functions: one for identifying the systems using the IP addresses, and the other for locating where these systems connect to the Internet. This separation allows LISP to aggregate the location information, so less of it needs to be stored in the core routers.
LISP works through dynamic encapsulation. Every packet that enters the core routers gets a new IP wrapper that carries information about the destination service provider network, not the end-user IP address. The wrapper is removed from the packet when it gets to the destination service provider.
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LISP would operate in conjunction with the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is the primary communications mechanism between edge and core routers.
“The problem we have is that IP addresses are assigned to hosts, and they’re not assigned topologically,” says Dino Farinacci, a Cisco Fellow and Senior Software Engineer and one of the authors of the LISP proposal. “This means the core routers on the ISP networks have to carry all of the site-specific routes. We’re trying to separate the topological significance of the address from the address allocation procedures…and that will reduce the size of the BGP routing table.”
LISP proponents say the technique also would make it easier for companies to switch carriers without having to acquire new IP addresses because the identification function would remain constant even if the location information changes. And LISP offers companies additional traffic engineering capabilities, backers say.
“More enterprises want to multihome their sites, and they want to do it in a low op-ex way,” Farinacci says. “Today they have to do it with heavy overhead. They have to use BGP, and they have to publish routes into the core. With LISP, we’re putting the routing policy at the edge where the customers can control the bandwidth they pay for.”
Cisco engineer Darrel Lewis, co-chair of the LISP working group, said a key point about LISP is how sites can negotiate their multi-homing policy in an independent, open manner.
LISP developers say the protocol will be deployed as a software upgrade to edge routers, and that no hardware upgrades will be required to run it. They say it will be incrementally deployable and can work with the current version of the Internet Protocol, known as IPv4, or a long-anticipated upgrade known as IPv6.
Posted in Communications |
Tags: blog, blogs, business, Communications, Design, developers, Hardware, information, Internet, Network, rim, Software, system, upgrade, world |
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Cyber-spy network uncovered
There is no conclusive evidence of Chinese government involvement
An electronic spy network, based mainly in China, has infiltrated computers from government offices around the world, Canadian researchers say.
They said the network had infiltrated 1,295 computers in 103 countries.
They included computers belonging to foreign ministries and embassies and those linked with the Dalai Lama – Tibet’s spiritual leader.
There is no conclusive evidence China’s government was behind it, researchers say. Beijing also denied involvement.
The report comes after a 10-month investigation by the Information Warfare Monitor (IWM), which comprises researchers from Ottawa-based think tank SecDev Group and the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies.
They were acting on a request from the Tibetan spiritual leader’s office to check whether the computers of his Tibetan exile network had been infiltrated.
Researchers found that ministries of foreign affairs of Iran, Bangladesh, Latvia, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Barbados and Bhutan appear to had been targeted.
Hacked systems were also discovered in the embassies of India, South Korea, Indonesia, Romania, Cyprus, Malta, Thailand, Taiwan, Portugal, Germany and Pakistan.
Posted in Communications |
Tags: blog, blogs, Computer, Computers, information, Network, research, system, world |
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BitTorrent – made easier
Bartor Here’s the app for those too lazy to perform the machinations of downloading purloined movies from BitTorrent sites like The Pirate Bay.
Android users can spend $3 for “BarTor,” which allows copyright scofflaws to scan movie bar codes of videos ? like those in the aisle at the local chain store. It automatically downloads the videos to home computers running uTorrent with web interfaces.
