[Community-Discuss] Spearheading Internet Development in Africa / Late commentary on fee discussion

[Andrew Alston]

Coenraad,

While personally as a member I don’t have a major issue with something like this – there are certain fundamental questions that need to be asked from my view point


  1.  How will the annual revenues of these entities be verified – will they be submitting audited financials each and every year to qualify for the discount?  Without audited financials – what is to stop wholesale abuse of a system like this?
  2.  Would we not be better off looking at a flat fee structure across ALL organisations (which would at current levels average out at less than $4.5k per party to achieve current revenue levels with the current membership base)
  3.  In one line you refer to revenues, it another line you refer to annual profits.  If we are working on revenue levels – that may be workable – if we are working on profit levels – that simply isn’t.  The reality is – there are many LARGE organisations out there that have bad years – and turn a net loss –I can show plenty of listed companies who have shown a net loss come year end.  So – this would need to be clarified as well

Thoughts?

Andrew


From: Coenraad Loubser <coenraad at zenzeleni.net>
Sent: 28 September 2018 13:26
To: community-discuss at afrinic.net
Cc: S Moonesamy <sm+afrinic at elandsys.com>; Bope Christian <christianbope at gmail.com>
Subject: [Community-Discuss] Spearheading Internet Development in Africa / Late commentary on fee discussion

Dear AfriNIC community

According to the ITU (2017) Africa has 739 million individuals without access to internet infrastructure.
We write to you representing 70 individual community networks from 30 African countries, most whom are not yet AfriNIC members, but who each have part of the solution to making available access to these areas where there is very little formal economic activity and where no alternative options exist, and where the internet can play a vital enabling role.
This letter has been under discussion during the past 4 months, and has been the subject of almost 100 messages on external community networks forums.

There is a class of Internet Service Provider that is not recognized by AfriNIC. In order to allow us to draw in their resources to help building out the invaluable resource that is the internet, as part of the AfriNIC community, we would like to discuss a mutually beneficial proposal that will play a huge role in setting up the next generation of ISPs in Africa - and promote an excellent platform for ISP- and IPv6 training.

We first contemplated proposing a definition for a Community Network or Non-Profit ISP, but having also worked with many small and competent ISPs, we recognize their challenges and the benefits that having them in this community can bring.

We would therefore like to propose, in line with simplest change possible, the following additional amendment to the fee schedule that has been under discussion:

3.6.5 An entity with annual revenues less than USD 350 000 that is required to register as an LIR, such as a Wireless User Group, Community Network or ISP will qualify for an additional discount of 40%.

Basic modelling shows that this can potentially require AfriNIC to give up up to $40k annually, but could yield a surplus in excess of $100k annually after a few years as these networks mature.
Alternately, a profit based model, which has not been explored as thoroughly:

3.6.5 An entity with annual profits of less than USD 100 000 that is required to register as an LIR, such as a Wireless User Group, Community Network or ISP, will qualify for a discount of 75%.
Regards

--
Coenraad Loubser
Co Authored by Dr. Carlos Rey-Moreno

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