Michael Joseph, CEO, Safaricom Ltd, has asked the government, specifically the licensing and regulatory commission, CCK to treat each operator equally and charge new players same fees Safaricom paid for their 3G licence, a whooping $25 million.

Its a nice thing that Safaricom has served us with all its might, while enjoying a monopoly and making a killing out of it. Safaricom has so far recovered their license fee and made more than enough profits from the users by over charging and in my view, we should let other players get easier terms since they have lesser subscribers and times have changed. Bandwidth is cheaper and more available too.

I really do not think its fair to the consumers not to allow the other players come in with easier terms because Safaricom will continue to control the prices.

As much as Safaricom has the best mobile internet service, its also the most expensive available. CCK, do us good by licensing other players and lets see where this takes our country.

I was in Nairobi when Safaricom launched the 7-day unlimited internet offer and I still had some data left on my account so I decided to use that until its finished then i can try the offer. Unfortunately I had to travel out of Kenya on Wednesday and at the airport, I managed to finish the data. When I got to my destination, I recharged my line and subscribed to the 7 day offer (Which I had actually just received an ad of via SMS a moment earlier while still out of Kenya). Unfortunately, I tried to connect and the connection was established but no data available. Connection kept timing out. When I called customer care, which got through to really quickly, they told me that I could not get the offer while roaming and as disappointed as I was, they promised to follow the case through to see what help I could get. I couldnt even get to connect using my normal airtime billing so I had to stay without the connection.

Next day a lady from Safaricom calls to just let me know they are working on the issue and they will be in touch. Another day later, they refund the airtime to my account, am able to use my account. Now that may sound like nothing to write about but please try call customer care in Tanzania, I have tried Vodacom, I will never try ever again. You just have no rights with the networks in Tanzania. Zain has an “unlimited” package for data which happens to be limited to 400mb. Try call them about it…

Congrats Michael Joseph, Safaricom made me proud to be a Kenyan today.

We are all happy when we can get an extra service at no extra cost. Blackberry addicts like me must admit that without the unlimited internet service that comes with it (For a small monthly fee), it would not be as interesting. Am sure at one point or another you have tried to connect your Blackberry as a modem or thought of how convenient the internet connection would be on your laptop… unlimited internet is the best thing that ever happened to me (Currently on an unlimited 3G connection). Anyway, here is how you can get your Blackberry to work as a modem on your computer or laptop.

I assume you have the Blackberry Desktop installed (If not, get the latest version from the Blackberry website or use the CD that came with it to install the software and modem drivers).

1. Open your Desktop manager, leave it running on the background, you don’t need to do anything else on it.
2. Connect your Blackberry to your computer/laptop.
3. Confirm that the modem is installed. You can do this by going to Control Panel > Phones and Modems. In the Modems tab, you should see a new Standard Modem on a new port (such as COM6 or COM11). Click Properties -> Diagnostics -> Query Modem. You should see the following:
   ATQ0V1E0 – OK
   AT+GMM – BlackBerry IPmodem
   AT+FCLASS=? COMMAND NOT SUPPORTED
   AT#CLS=? COMMAND NOT SUPPORTED
   AT+GCI? COMMAND NOT SUPPORTED
   AT+GCI=? COMMAND NOT SUPPORTED
   ATI1 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   ATI2 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   ATI3 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   ATI4 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   ATI5 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   ATI6 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   ATI7 – Research In Motion / BlackBerry IPmodem
   (Please note that this may differ depending on your Blackberry Model, just verify that the modem is connected and it works)
4. Click Properties -> Advanced. Add  initialization command with the appropriate carrier-specific APN Setting.
   For Vista users only: Under Control Panel>Phone and Modem>Properties on the General Tab, click “Change Settings”. After giving Administrator approval, click the Advanced tab. There, enter the appropriate APN settings for your carrier as noted below.

   +cgdcont=1,”IP”,”APN” e.g. Safaricom in Kenya would be +cgdcont=1,”",”safaricom”

5. Create a new connection and use the Blackberry modem to connect. Dial up number should be your normal GPRS/EDGE number (*99# for Safaricom) and authentication still the same (Safaricom: user – saf, password – data).
6. Disable IP Header Compression (*Vista users, see the note below)

1. Make sure TCP/IP Properties (Advanced) “Use IP Header Compression” checkbox is NOT checked. To verify this, do these steps:
   

   1. Start Menu->Network Connections->”BlackBerry Modem”
   2. Click Properties Button
   3. Click Networking Tab
   4. Select “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)”
   5. Click Properties Button
   6. Click Advanced… Button
   7. Disable “Use IP header compression” checkbox
   8. Click all OK buttons to close all dialogs

   Also make sure you clear all these checkboxes, if you see any of these checked:
   Turn off “Enable Modem Compression”
   For Vista users only: Under the Network and Sharing Center, click “Manage Network Connections”. When the Network Connections screen is visible, you should have the Blackberry Modem connection you created. Right click the Blackberry Modem and select “Properties”. Under the Properties screen on the General tab, select the “Configure” button. Ensure that ALL check boxes are unchecked. Select “OK” to exit the screen. Under the Networking tab, select the properties for the Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPV4). On the Properties screen, select the “Advanced” button. Ensure that “Use IP Header Compression” is unchecked. Select OK to exit the screen.

   Turn off “Enable Hardware Flow Control”
   Turn off “Enable Modem Error Control”

   After this step you are done! Connect to the internet and enjoy your surfing. Please note that I tested this with my Blackberry 5310 Perl. Lets know if you have any issues.
   

Open Source

We expect internet usage in Africa to double in the next few months and that gets us thinking of a few things we need to work on to tap some profitability before the Internet becomes another way of taking the African resources to the west because they already have systems in use. I have had my share of life on the web and I am in a position to advice on open source and free systems that may be profitable to the community and business minded African if well implemented. I will go through a few here.

Magento
The launch of Magento Open Source last year changed the e-commerce software industry, with magento coming out as one of the biggest and the most well structured software even when compared to most commercial scripts. Magento is built on the Zend Framework and is stable, user friendly and open source, meaning there is more to it coming. OS-Commerce is also a good system.

Laconica
With this age of micro-blogging, this free software comes in handy, its a tweeter clone built on PHP. Just so you know, tweeter is built on Ruby on Rails. While researching on this, I found this list as a top 10 for free micro-blogging software from Honeytechblog

1. http://chyrp.net/
2. http://twoorl.com/
3. http://www.revou.com/
4. http://www.folkstr.com/
5. http://www.gelatocms.com/
6. http://smob.sioc-project.org/
7. http://sweetter.net/
8. http://laconi.ca/
9. http://jisko.net
10. http://www.floopo.com/

OS-Date
I dont know how much online dating works these days but this is a good free system by Darren Gates. The best thing is the 5 dollar shop that offers plugins, themes and components of this system at only $5.

Dolphin Social Networking
This group of free software is the most amazing thing I ever came across. It offers more than a social networking website and all for free!

Joomla
So far this is the largest free CMS and I guess the most widely used in Kenya. It offers a host of modules and plugins and it can get quite professional. Give it a try if you havent. Joomla geeks you can also leave a comment with a link to a Joomla site you have made.

You may know a host of others that I havent meantioned, this blog post allows comments so please extend it!

Good job done by Seacom so far is commendable. So I take a moment to try and figure out who Seacom is and according to their website, “SEACOM is a Mauritian company owned 75% by African investors as a collaboration between East and Southern Africans and owns 100% of the SEA International Cable. A small group of Investors with proven access to both debt and equity, were selected specifically because they were not national telecommunications operators thus avoiding value chain interference by to separating the ownership of the asset from its use” That is good for PR. Just before that paragraph, there is a small chart of cable ownership and it leaves me wondering why Kenya and Tanzania has to own only 35% of the cable in our countries while Seacom owns the other 65%. Looking at all the other countries where Seacom is present, the country owns 100% of the cable.

I just have questions, why cant we be 100% owners? What are the direct implications on cost to the consumer for that? What were the ownership options and is it that we didnt have investors with the capacity or was it dictated or politically “arranged”?  So far, Seacom cant even release the list of ISPs buying bandwidth from them something that makes me even get more questions.