The number of Ugandan mobile phone subscribers has crossed the 14 million mark, the official from the Information and Communications Technology Minister have confirmed.

They said that currently some 42% of Ugandans now own a mobile phone, which shows that Uganda is making major strides toward making mobile phones affordable and accessible for the wider population.

“The wrangles affecting telecom operators have been largely brought about by the interconnection rates. We hope a new law will embrace the interconnection regulations,” said the former Minister, Aggrey Awori.

It comes as telecom operators MTN and Uganda Telecom continue to battle over a Ush20b (US$8m) dispute that was brought about after a memorandum of understanding in reducing the interconnection fees.

Awori, who was handing over the ICT ministry to Ruhakana Rugunda, urged the ministry to further pursue the completion of the National Data Transmission Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) cable, which he said is in its second phase.

The NBI broadly consists of 1,536 kilometers of optical fiber cable across the country. It connects Kampala to the Uganda-Kenya border, Uganda-Rwanda border and Uganda-Sudan border.

“Mr. Minister I urge you to ensure the completion of all phases of the NBI cable because it’s this cable that will connect Uganda to the rest of the world,” stressed Awori at the press conference.

The outgoing minister, who said he will join the broadcasting and television industry, added that during his tenure, the ministry rolled out the National Business Process Outsourcing strategy and model that has ensured creation of jobs for more than 500 youths.

A new round of telecom price wars appears to be underway and Ugandan analysts are confident that the new battle will continue to assist and help customers benefit from the price cuts.

“What we are seeing with Warid and others are efforts to undercut the market and this is going to mean users will get reduced rates and will be able to talk more so it looks like it will be benefiting the people again at the behest of companies’ profits,” says Robert Umbabo, a Kampala-based telecom analyst.

This comes after Warid Telecom, who cut its rates on voice calls from Shs 8 to Shs 5 and to finally Shs 3 per second, further reduced voice call rates within the network to Shs 1 per second, forcing other operators to follow suit.

The company announced earlier this month another offer that will see mobile customers receive three times the value of airtime they load. For example, if a mobile user loads airtime worth Shs 5,000 and above, they will get a 200% bonus. The bonus airtime can be used to make voice calls and send sms messages.

A Shs 5,000 scratch card gives one bonus airtime of Ush.10, 000 which in essence means one will have total airtime of Shs 15,000 instantly and the same applies to the other denominations above Shs 5,000. Bharti Airtel has also announced another customer-oriented service that allows a user to purchase a SIM pack containing two SIM cards with consecutive numbers.

Airtel’s Uganda Managing Director V.G Somasekhar says the sim card has been fitted with a technology that enables a customer to access the Internet, besides being WAP enabled or not.
Uganda Telecom (UTL) has reloaded their Endobo product – which allows mobile users to use only Shs 500 to make unlimited daily calls on their network.

Although Google has stopped the advancement of its own newspaper scanning project, the tech giant is still working to make books accessible freely online. The company announced this week that it is working to digitize some 250,000 out-of-copyright volumes from the vast holdings of the British Library.


Scanned items, which will be selected by the British Library and handled (as well as paid for) by Google, will be made available for free at books.google.co.uk and the British Library’s website. Users can download and read items through Google Books, as well as conduct full-text searches.


The 250,000 works will include books, pamphlets and periodicals dated between 1700 and 1870, spanning major events such as the French and Industrial revolutions, the Crimean War, the invention of train travel and the end of slavery, the British Library said in a statement.
Google has partnered with more than 40 libraries on similar projects.

A universal internet body has voted to permit the formation of new website domain suffixes, the biggest change for the online world in years. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) plans to dramatically boost the number of domain endings from the current 22.

Internet address names will end with almost any word and be in any language. Icann will begin taking applications next year, with corporations and cities expected to be among the first. "Icann has opened the internet's addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination," said Rod Beckstrom, president and chief executive officer for Icann. "No one can predict where this historic decision will take us."

There will be several hundred new generic top-level domain names (gTLDs), which could include such addresses as .google, .coke, or even .BBC. There are currently 22 gTLDs, as well as about 250 country-level domain names such as .ug or .de. It will cost $185,000 (£114,000) to apply for the suffixes, and companies would need to show they have a legitimate claim to the name they are buying.

Analysts say it is a price that global giants might be willing to pay - in order to maximise their internet presence. The vote completes a six-year negotiation process and is the biggest change to the system since .com was first introduced 26 years ago. Icann said it was beginning a global communications programme to raise awareness of the new domain names. Applications will start on 12 January.

High standards

Companies and organisations seeking one of the new gTLDs will have to meet high technical standards, according to Bruce Tonkin, chief strategy officer at Melbourne IT, a domain registry service. "You need IT robustness and you need intellectual property protections beyond what is available in the dot com space. "You have to have 24/7 abuse team. You have to have mechanisms where a trademark holder has first right to get their name," he said.

The higher standards, said Mr Tonkin, meant the application process would be extremely rigorous. "Using a real estate analogy, it would be roughly the equivalent of getting approval to build a sky scraper.

”There are roughly 50 questions, roughly 2-3 pages per question. Icaan will then use experts in each field to evaluate them.
"The concern that some people have is that the standards of these buildings will be so high, that they will never get built. It will be too expensive," he said.

IBM today wokeup on "Happy Birthday" song all over the world as it marked its 100th anniversary of its founding on June 16, 1911.
To celebrate the milestone, the company is releasing a book, "Making the World Work Better: The Ideas That Shaped a Century and a Company," and debuting a new film, "Wild Ducks,".
Some of IBM's achievements:-

• Floppy Disk Drive - in 1971

The first floppy was an 8-inch flexible plastic disk coated with magnetic iron oxide; computer data was written to and read from the disk's surface.

The nickname "floppy" came from the disk's flexibility. The floppy disk was considered a revolutionary device in the "History of Computers" for its portability which provided a new and easy physical means of transporting data from computer to computer.
Others were 5 1/4-inch, 3 1/2-inch, Post Floppy Disk.

• Developing the first hard disk drive that created the data storage industry.

• Fortran: The First Successful High Level Programming LanguageFortran or formula translation was the first high level programming language (software) invented by John Backus for IBM in 1954, and released commercially in 1957. Fortran is still used today for programming scientific and mathematical applications

• The invention of the IBM Personal Computer that launched the PC revolution.

On August 12, 1981, IBM released their new computer, re-named the IBM PC. The "PC" stood for "personal computer" making IBM responsible for popularizing the term "PC". The first IBM PC ran on a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor.
The PC came equipped with 16 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 256k. The PC came with one or two 160k floppy disk drives and an optional color monitor.
Time Magazine named the computer "man of the year".

On the ceremony, Chairman of the Board, President and CEO Samuel J. Palmisano identified the key lesson IBM has learned over 100 years: In order to succeed for the long term, you must manage for the long term.

"For IBMers, long-term thinking means continually moving to the future," he said. "IBM has survived and thrived for 100 years by remaining true to our core values, while being ready to change everything else. This has allowed us to transform technology, business and society through our first century, and we believe it will enable us to achieve even more in our second."

Happy Birthday IBM, we have enjoyed your innovations that have been tested with time.