IN CONVERSATION
|
THE CHANNEL
decided to leave Ofcom last
year after the spectrum
auction in order to go try
and digitise my continent of
Africa and digitise emerging
markets. I’m also running
the Dynamic Spectrum
Alliance, because I’m absolutely
passionate about the fact that in
order to digitise emerging markets,
and emerging countries in places
like Africa and Asia, we need to
also start by fixing spectrum policy.
We need to change the way that
spectrum is typically allocated
across the world by regulators on
an exclusive basis. Dynamic
spectrum access ultimately means
spectrum is being shared, which
means you have more ability to
drive different players in the same
market because the spectrum is
shared.
I think if we don’t do that, then
in places like Africa and Asia, or
countries like Bangladesh and
Indonesia, things like 4G
technology will never get to the
rural areas where a significant part
of the population live, and they’ll
never be connected – forget about
digital broadcast and the digital
switchover. It’s a very different
situation to what we had in the
United Kingdom, where we were
trying to clear some of the spectrums
to auction them for 4G. In the
United Kingdom, regulators like me
actually imposed an obligation for
4G to go to 98% of the population.
But I could not do a trick like that
in Africa. We need a different
spectrum policy across emerging
markets which will allow different
technologies, not only 4G, but also
TV white spaces, satellite, and
cheaper versions of 2G and 3G
technologies.
What is your book
TMT for
Developing Economies
about?
It’s all about how to make TMT –
telecommunications, media and
technology – improve the
economies for Africa and elsewhere
for the 2020’s. I say the 2020’s
deliberately, because it takes ten
years to make things happen. In the
United Kingdom, the digital
switchover project took eight years,
from inception to completion. So
the idea that it’s going to take two
years in Africa to make this happen
doesn’t make any sense.
So you spend a lot of time on the
ground in Africa.
Yes, I’m giving a lot of invited
lectures and speeches about the
book right now. And I’m running a
very big digital switchover project
in an African country, where I won
the contract competitively against
some big companies. I’m designing
the network right now and writing
the invitation to tender to bring in
partners to implement the real
network. I’m also involved in
advising in another country, which
I cannot disclose, on their spectrum
policy and their digital switchover
strategy. So right now, I typically
spend two to three weeks a month
in Africa.
What do you see as the most
important outcome of DSO?
We want to do the digital
switchover to release the spectrum,
typically through 4G auctions, like
we did in the UK, and also to open
some of those frequencies for High
Definition TV, Standard Definition
I
CONNECTING
THEFOURBILLION
In major economies, the inevitability of the digital switchover is taken for granted.
But for most of the developing world DSO is interlinked with a vast array of
connectivity and infrastructure challenges. We asked H. Nwana how he is trying to
help emerging markets digitise
”
Many
African
and
emerging
markets
are going
through
DSO as a
purely
techno-
cratic
exercise.
That is a
bigmistake
“
THE CHANNEL
|
ISSUE 2 2014
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15
