Is it too much to ask that when trying to contact a company they actually answer the phone? I’m not talking about a direct office number. I mean contacting the company’s central switchboard. Often these numbers just ring and ring – sometimes for so long that by the time someone answers, you can’t remember the purpose of the call.

This recently happened to me. But I wasn’t trying to contact just any old company – I was trying to contact one of South Africa’s major telcos. And it wasn’t an off-chance occurrence – this went on for about three days. When I finally managed to reach them they were completely unapologetic and offered no explanation for their complete lack of availability. If this sounds familiar to you, you’ll enjoy Rodney Weidemann’s feature on the future of telephony. He discusses some of the current and expected developments in the field, particularly in relation to contact centres. One of the technologies he discusses is word-spotting and emotion detection which is designed to alert supervisors to the use of certain words and phrases by callers. This creates the opportunity to escalate the call to a supervisor or manager with the aim of averting problems.

I certainly hope that the call centre industry is prepared for the upsurge in the number of calls that are going to be escalated to the powers that be. If not that, they’re going to have to figure out how to adjust the sensitivity of the technology.

The growth of the mobile market in Africa continues to outpace that of the rest of the world two-fold. The fact that well in excess of 21% of the African population use mobile phones has lead to this technology being utilised to its maximum potential, as many subscribers use their phones for much more than just making calls and sending text messages. Gavin Smith considers these and other ICT developments on the continent, including the new undersea fibre-optic cables. The completion of the fibre-optic ring will make a vast difference to the lives of many Africans by making affordable broadband available to the entire continent.
Smart card technology has been around for quite some time now with most of us carrying them around in the form of mobile phone sim cards. This technology has many other uses though and Africa seems to be poised to make full use of them – from healthcare and identification to storing virtual cash and credit. Lance Harris expounds on this technology and its uses, particularly in the developing world, in his article ‘Swipe here’ on page 40.

The staff at African Communications trust that you have found the last four editions of this publication to be useful and interesting. The coming year looks set to be exciting with the rate of ICT infrastructure development on our continent progressing apace. Look out for the first edition of 2009 in your postbox at the beginning of February in which we will continue to keep you informed of the technological, infrastructural and policy developments on the continent.

In the last edition of African Communications the article on page 56 titled ‘Who’s chopping your dollars online?’ was erroneously credited to David Le Page. The article should have been credited to Ted Currie. We apologise for any confusion this may have caused.

James Retief