Balancing Act CEO Russell Southwood says although Botswana and Cape Verde recently moved in the direction of legalising voice over IP (VOIP) services in Africa, they are still part of a small group of African countries to have done so.

‘There are only 10 African countries that have legalised VOIP,’ he says. According to an ITWeb report, VOIP is the Internet Protocol (IP) technology that allows voice information to be sent in digital form, rather than using the traditional circuit-committed protocols of the public switched telephone network. A major advantage of VOIP and Internet telephony is that it avoids the tolls charged by ordinary telephone services. However, Southwood says the lack of a legal framework for VOIP to operate shows incumbent telecommunications players in Africa, be they fixed or mobile, want to retain their stronghold on the market. As to whether VOIP is automatically illegal if it is not specifically legalised, Southwood says: ‘In Anglophone countries, law relies more on custom and practice, and it has tended to be argued that gateway licences make VOIP illegal for all but those operating under the licence.’