WGSDIA – Launch Google Voice in Africa

This the second installment in a series of posts in which I have the hubris to reflect upon What Google Should Do In Africa (#WGSDIA). There is some context for this post in the preface to the series.

Imagine that you are a smart entrepreneurial African geek who has recognised that the huge opportunity of providing low-cost voice and Internet access in Africa.  You put together some new but remarkably inexpensive WiFi equipment from a company like Ubiquiti and set up a wireless mesh network in your community.  You backhaul it to the Internet with an ADSL line if your lucky enough to be near one or with a wireless backhaul to your most obliging ISP.  So far so good.  But what you discover with your community is that while there is a small and slowly growing demand for Internet access, the real demand is still for affordable voice.  So you offer free voice services over your wireless mesh and the community loves it because, after all, the majority of phone calls are local anyway.

The community is very excited about this and the love the service but they want more.  They want to be able to receive calls from mobile networks and the Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) and they want to be able to make calls out as well.  They want to have real phone numbers that people can call them on from anywhere.  Now things become more challenging.  In South Africa, in order to be allocated a block of phone numbers, you need an Electronic Communication Services (ECS) license from the regulator.  This is not too big a deal and requires only modest sums of money and slightly larger amounts of patience.  Having achieved that you now have to negotiate interconnects with the major operators.  This IS a big deal.  The operators each require a million Rand (approx 125,000 USD) as a bank guarantee to create the interconnect.  Some of them still require extremely expensive carrier-grade equipment in order to connect.  Worst of all, some of them either flat-out refuse to interconnect (which is against the law but some operators are a law unto themselves) or bureaucratively render the process so slow that they might as well have refused.

Here the entrepreneur runs into a brick wall that requires both deep pockets and deep patience to resolve.

Cut over to Mountain View.  On March 11th of this year, Google launched GoogleVoice, a service which offers you a single phone number which will ring all of your phones.  In addition, Google Voice offers free calling and texting in the continental U.S. as well as voicemail, conference calling, voicemail via email, the list goes on.  Google Voice is essentially a re-branding and upgrade of

• Login or register to post comments
• Feed: Steve Song's Blog
• Original article