South Africa-based Guyanese telecoms engineering Mortimer Hope touts global connectivity
South Africa-based Guyanese telecommunications engineering specialist Mortimer Hope, 57, has represented his adopted homeland and the continent of Africa in his area of expertise at regional and international forums for more than three decades and is now engaged in a global project to connect the unconnected through the internet by placing unmanned aircraft in the stratosphere.
Earlier this month Hope was the only African speaker on the panel on Connecting the Unconnected at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Kyoto, Japan.
“This is an exciting project we are working on,” Hope said, adding that the plan was to use unmanned aircraft in the stratosphere to beam cellular signals back to earth so that cell phones could be used in any part of the world, including the jungles of Guyana.
Having made Africa his home, Hope told Stabroek Weekend in an interview from his Johannesburg home, “Looking at me, no one will say I’m not African. I work on the continent. I am fairly well known in the telecoms space on the African continent from both the regulatory aspect and then I was on the other side of the fence as a mobile operator for quite a number of years. Now I’m a consultant. I have paid my dues. Most of my working life has been in South Africa and in Africa.
“When I came, I told myself, I came to build my life here. I did what I was doing with that attitude. I tried my best not to view myself as an outsider.”
Most of his working life involves travelling and Hope likes to travel.
His next trip will be to attend the International Telecommunications
Union (ITU) radio communications conference being held from 20th November to 15th December in Dubai as a member of the South African delegation.
“Every month I travel for about two weeks. I’m like a global nomad because of the work I do,” he said. Through his travels he has caught up and shared ideas with many Guyanese professionals and government officials at various forums. “Wherever I travel, I try to get a few days for myself, to explore, especially if it’s a place I’m going to for the first time. The job I do allows me to travel. I always liked travelling. When I was about 15 or 16 years old, during the school holidays, I went on a trip to Suriname with a friend, his brother and their mother, who was a trader. It was exciting. We were all from Buxton.”
Hope lost his father a few months after his birth. Hope’s mother was a teacher. He was the last child for his father and the first of four siblings for his mother.
Hope had his basic primary education at Buxton Congregational School, now Buxton Primary but wrote the common entrance examination at St Gabriel’s Primary in Georgetown. His godfather, educator Pat Taylor, felt Hope was not serious about the examination and had him transferred to St Gabriel’s for a year.
From St Gabriel’s he secured a place at St Stanislaus College (Saints), where he enjoyed both academics and sports. After writing the General Certificate of Education (GCE) Ordinary Level examinations, his godfather, who was the then principal of Queen’s College (QC), had Hope transferred to QC to write the science subjects at the GCE Advanced Level.
He was placed in Form Five R to repeat fifth form to strengthen his maths and science subjects. At QC was involved in the school societies, a number of sports including basketball and athletics. He represented Saints, QC and Georgetown at schools’ national sporting events, especially in cricket, sprints and long jump. Like at Saints, he made many good friends at QC.
At university in Moscow he played basketball. “Now I just play golf,” he said.
Recently, he has been paying more attention to what is happening in Guyana. “I’m thinking of giving back or getting more involved in business in Guyana but at the right time,” he added.
He is involved with the old students’ bodies of both secondary schools he attended. QC’s 180th anniversary is in October next year and he is planning to take part in the activities.
After writing GCE A Levels, Hope obtained a scholarship to study computer science in the then Soviet Union of Socialist Republics. Before travelling he completed the statutory one-year Guyana National Service requirement.
In Russia, he switched from computer science to telecommunications after meeting with some students in language school who believed the future was in telecommunications.
Hope returned to Guyana in June 1992 after graduating from Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics with a master’s degree shortly before general elections were held in October that year. “No one was willing to appoint us for fear that a new government would most likely fire us,” he recalled.
While waiting to be appointed, Hope taught mathematics and science at Golden Grove Secondary and electronics at the Guyana Industrial Training Institute.
In March, 1993 he was appointed a transmission engineer at the then GTV now National Communications Network. “I left after a few months. I couldn’t handle it,” he related.
He joined Neal and Massy as a management trainee and was based at Neal Com, the section of the business that dealt with radio and telephone communications systems, where he learned to install and programme telephone systems and
two-way radios.
From Neal Com, he joined Texaco (Guyana) Inc as a customer service representative with responsibility for the East Coast Demerara up to West Coast Berbice. “I enjoyed that for three years before moving to South Africa in 1996 at 30 years [old].”
South Africa
While studying in Russia, Hope had married a South African woman, who was also studying telecommunications. He is now the father of four daughters from two marriages.
When he and his now ex-wife completed their studies, they came to Guyana.
“She didn’t like it there,” he recalled. “At the first opportunity she got, she returned to South Africa and I joined her later. My image of South Africa was of the Soweto uprising. That was the reason I resisted coming here initially. When I came, I loved it and I am still here.”
When he arrived, he joined his ex-wife at Bop Broadcasting in Mahikeng in the North West Province as a transmission engineer. He worked there for a year then moved to Johannesburg to work with the then South African Railways, now Transnet SOC Ltd., as a signals and telecommunications engineer.
After a year at the railway, Hope’s supervisor advised him to join the newlyestablished telecoms regulator company, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA). “He told me, ‘You’re a young man. If you get one foot in, you can go very far with ICASA’.”
In 1998, the 32-year-old Hope started to work with ICASA as the manager of the radio monitoring unit. “The unit monitored the radio frequencies across the country and picked up illegal transmissions among other issues. You have broadcast radio, television, two-way radios, the mobile systems and satellite systems,” he related.
South Africa has over 100 commercial radio stations (national and regional) community television and community radio stations, as well as, the public broadcaster - South Africa Broadcasting Corporation that operates 19 radio stations and six television stations.
Hope spent two years in the radio monitoring unit before being appointed head of the spectrum management department where he stayed until the end of 2003. The radio monitoring unit was one of six units that reported to the head of the spectrum management department.
“When I started at ICASA, it took applicants a long time to obtain their radio and telecoms licences. As head of the spectrum management department, I realised the administrative issues were done fairly quickly but the applications were stalled at the technical office” he recalled. “I got everyone trained, got rid of the backlog with assistance from the regional offices. Once the backlog was gone, we made sure the technical officers stuck to the service level agreement of two weeks to process an application, and kept it there. Applications previously took between four to six months.”
Working with ICASA, Hope had to get quickly acquainted with the country’s laws, specifically telecoms legislation, regulations and the criminals’ procedures acts. He worked closely with the law enforcement agencies and was appointed a
peace officer to inspect premises and seize equipment in the execution of his duties.
As head of the spectrum management department, he also introduced the type approval method by ICASA of any telecommunications equipment by a South African operator. Once approved, the supplier is required to put a label on the equipment to say ‘Type Approved by ICASA’ to show it is approved for use in South Africa.
“When I introduced that, the equipment suppliers complained it would cost them a lot of money. They were given a year’s extension to get in line after which it was introduced,” he said.
Vodacom
Shortly after the type approval was introduced. Hope received a phone call on a Friday afternoon from a senior official of the Vodacom Group asking him if he had applied for a position advertised with the company. “I said, I didn’t even know there was a position.”
The deadline for the submission of applications was the same day and he applied as the senior official advised. “That job, as head of technical regulations at Vodacom Group, came looking for me.”
The Vodacom Group is a South African mobile communications company, providing voice, messaging, data and converged services to over 130 million people across Africa. It comprises 12 companies.
Hope started working in January 2004 at Vodacom where he spent 10 years. “I got more training in executive management. Because Vodacom is part of a group, I got the opportunity to move around the group and I supported Vodacom operations within the African continent. That was when I started to travel a lot across Africa,” he noted.
He was in charge of technical regulations that included radio frequency spectrum, base stations, fibre optics, and any facility used for mobile operations and cell phone numbering.
Before joining Vodacom, Hope was introduced to phone numbering as head of the South African Development Community (SADC) committee on standards and numbering at ICASA.
SADC comprises 15 southern African countries.
“At Vodacom I became the custodian of over 100 million numbers that Vodacom was using. I introduced a facility where a number is only placed on a sim card when the customer inserts it to his cell phone and connects to the network then the network sends a number to the sim card. That innovation was introduced because there were too many numbers sitting in the distribution channel on sim cards that were in the stores or in the warehouses,” he said.
The Vodacom Group is a member of the global Vodafone Group and Hope worked closely with his counterparts in that group.
Living and working in South Africa, Hope had to be knowledgeable about the country’s languages. The business language in South Africa and across the Vodacom operations is English. “But I also understand Zulu fairly well and speak a bit of it,” he said. “I also understand Sotho. We have 11 main languages in South Africa. There are four or five languages in the Zulu group which if you speak one of them you can understand the others. In social settings, you need to understand at least one of the groups.”
GSMA, consultancy
After ten years at Vodacom, Hope experienced “itchy feet.” At Vodacom he was for several years the chairman of the GSM Association (GSMA) Africa. The GSMA represents the interest of mobile operators worldwide.
“While chatting with one of the executives of the GSMA London head office during an annual GSMA conference in Cape Town, the executive suggested I consider working at the association and instead of working with Vodacom and Vodafone, work for all mobile operators worldwide.”
A year later, Hope was appointed GMSA’s director of public policy and spectrum with responsibility for Africa. After a few months, he was appointed the head of GSMA Africa which came with managing its office in Nairobi, Kenya.
“And I’m based in South Africa. I did that for two years. The office was new and it involved travelling to and from
Johannesburg to Nairobi almost every month. I didn’t want to move to Nairobi. I had children writing exams and I didn’t want to uproot the family. Once the two-year contract expired I didn’t renew it.”
In 2017 Hope decided to start his own consultancy.
“It was very slow at first. In 2018, a group of us who were formerly at the GSMA, met at the annual Mobile
World Congress in Barcelona. While chatting, we realised we were all doing the same thing and that some of the clients wanted a campaign that would cover various continents. Individually we couldn’t do it but if we worked together, we could,” he revealed.
They were all working individually in country, with Microsoft. “We were working on TV white spaces (unused frequencies of certain gaps in VHF and UHF spectrum that can be used to provide wireless internet services). When we realised what was happening we formed the company, Policy Impact Partners in 2018. We went to Microsoft and said we can do this campaign globally for you.” They had reach in Africa, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.
They have also worked for the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance among others. “We have been looking at spectrum sharing and getting more spectrum for wifi so it can operate faster, cheaper, and with better quality worldwide,” he revealed.
Policy Impact Partners is now working with Softbank at the level of the ITU to get regulatory provisions in place to put a cellular base-station in the stratosphere in unmanned aircraft, a project that Hope is very involved in.