Africa is the world’s fastest growing market for mobile phones over the last three years with 65 million new subscribers in 2007 alone, according to the head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Hamadoun Touré, ITU Secretary-General, said the figure is cited in the United Nations agency’s regional report entitled “African Telecommunication/ICT Indicators 2008: At a Crossroads,” which he presented at the opening of the ITU Telecom Africa trade fair here on Monday.
A UN press release quoted Toure as saying, “Today, the African ICT industry is an exciting place to be. Market liberalization continues and most countries have established regulatory bodies to ensure a fair, competitive and enabling environment.”
The report indicated that there were more than 250 million mobile subscribers on the continent at the start…
It would be the biggest thing to pass between India and South Africa since Mahatma Gandhi moved from one country to the other. This week it emerged that Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile-phone operator in India, is holding “exploratory” talks to buy South Africa’s MTN, the biggest operator in Africa.
According to the Financial Times, Bharti has indicated it would be willing to pay about $19 billion for 51% of the company. That would make it the heftiest overseas acquisition ever made by an Indian firm, more than Tata Steel paid for Corus, a British steelmaker, and seven times the amount India invested in the whole of Africa over the ten years to 2004.
The deal would unite the leading companies in the world’s two most promising…
Tags: Acquisition, Africa, Bharti Airtel, Corus, Gartner, India, mobile-phone operator, MTN, South Africa, Tata Steel, the Financial Times, USD.
Frost & Sullivan finds Africa’s demand for mobile internet access is growing quickly, with operators anticipating growth of between 40 per cent and 50 per cent between 2006 and 2009.
“The poor state of fixed line infrastructure is creating the potential for the African mobile internet market to boom,” states Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Spiwe Chireka. “Mobile internet has emerged as the solution to the continent’s last mile connectivity problem.”
Mobile internet is significantly more cost-effective to deploy than fixed line services, is much cheaper and easier for users to acquire, covers a larger area and allows users access while they on the move.
However, the high cost of mobile internet-compatible handsets coupled with the pricing structure remains a significant challenge. Moreover, the majority of Africa’s population still…
LIRNEasia researchers will be among panelists at the 3rd Global Knowledge Conference organized by Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP).
Two sessions will be based on the LIRNEasia’s study on Teleuse at the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP), which is to presented in the form of an interactive quiz show. The background paper is available here.
A session titled ‘Making Communities Disaster Resilient’, hopes to highlight issues related to developing a robust solution for strengthening community resilience in the face of natural disasters. The background paper is available here.
LIRNE researchers will also be among panelists at a session on regulatory transparency and effectiveness. The session, entitled ‘Hello Regulator’, hopes to explore how having easy access to regulatory information and processes can support community and public agendas, access to ICT and so forth.
Click here for further information available on the…
Mauritius-based private equity venture Seacom has started the construction of a fibre optic cable that will link southern and east Africa with India and Europe.
The $650 million project covers more than 15,000 kilometres to link South Africa to India and France through Mozambique, Madagascar, Kenya and Tanzania. It is expected to provide first broadband access to countries in East Africa, which are currently using satellite connections.
In a similar project, NEPAD e-Africa Commission signed a deal with an American firm 5-P Holdings in November 2007 for the construction of an undersea submarine cable to link every country in Africa with the outside world.
This is a joint project between African investors and US telecommunications development company Herakles Telecom. The cable will be ready to…
Tags: Africa, Alcatel-Lucent, broadband access, East Africa, Europe, fibre optic, France, Herakles Telecom, India, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, satellite connections, South Africa, Tanzania, telecommunications development, United States, USD.
A new report from Portico Research reveals that over half of the population of the entire world will have a mobile phone by 2008. The study predicts that the global mobile penetration rate will pass the 50 per cent mark next year, with a further 1.5 billion new mobile phone subscribers expected to join their ranks over the next four years.
Portico Research says global mobile penetration rate will be at 75 per cent by 2011.
It is now believed that some 65 per cent of these “new-to-the-world” users will come from the Asia Pacific region, rather than from Africa as has previously been though most likely, with the majority being from rural regions in countries such as India and Pakistan.
Portico also says that although sector…
The implications of mobile number portability (MNP) were discussed at a Workshop on Implementing Mobile Number Portability, held in August 2007 in Islamabad, Pakistan. The forum, comprising participants from the Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa, provided insight into the technical, regulatory and operational aspects impacted by the porting process, with a focus on the Pakistani MNP experience.
The reasons cited in favor of MNP were classified into advantages to subscribers and regulators. The former were benefited by an increase in choice (of packages) and the eliminated costs of having to inform third parties of a number change, while the latter saw MNP as an approach to attract new investment and generate healthy competition. Operators on the other hand, were split in their views; new entrants…
Tags: Africa, Asia-Pacific, Australia, cellular telephone, Finland, fixed line services, GSM, Hong Kong, implemented solution, intelligent network, Ireland, Islamabad, John Horrocks, Malta, Middle East, MNP, Pakistan, PTA, Singapore, SMS, Telecommunication Authority of Singapore, The Netherlands, United Kingdom.
Missed calling (also referred to as beeping, flashing and many other names) has been most talked about in Africa; Johnathan Donner has been talking and writing about it for some time now; his research provides interesting insights into what he calls the ‘rules’ of beeping. A recent Reuters article looks at the growing phenomenon in not only Africa but other regions too. LIRNEasia’s Teleuse@BOP survey findings also show that the phenomenon is considerably common among bottom of the pyramid (defined here as Socioeconomic Classification groups D & E) phone users in India, Pakistan, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and Thailand. But what’s more interesting, is that the phenomenon was seen as being used more or less to the same extent in the ‘middle and top of…
Tags: Africa, Andrew Heavens, Cairo, Cape Town, cellular network, cellular telephone, cheaper technology, Devine Kofiloto, Ethiopia, Faisal Ijaz Khan, India, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Irene Mbarika, Johnathan Donner, Jonathan Donner, KHARTOUM, Microsoft, mobile telephone markets, mobile-phone operator, much cheaper technology, Pakistan, Philippines, Reuters, Rwanda, social protocol, SouthEast Asia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, technology association, Thailand, the Philippines, U.N.\'s International Telecommunication Union, USD, Victor W.A. Mbarika, Zain (formerly MTC).
World now has 4b phone lines, says UN | Sep 05, 2007 | telecomasia.net
(Associated Press via NewsEdge) Largely because of the mobile phone boom in developing countries, telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to 4 billion lines worldwide, according to a report from the UN telecommunications agency.
Tags: Africa, Associated Press, Broadband, cellular telephone, China, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, India, International Telecommunications Union, mobile phones, telecommunications agency, telephone service, Thomson, United Nations.
Sales in Emerging Markets Help Nokia Add to Its Cellphone Lead - New York Times
Nokia sold 100 million mobile devices in the period, an increase of 29 percent over 2006, while the overall industry growth was about 14 percent, with 262 million mobile devices sold globally, Nokia said.
But the group again warned about the performance of its troubled network operations, describing market conditions as challenging because of heavy competition.
“We shall have to increase the amount and speed of cost cutting,” the chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said, giving no details.
The greatest growth in Nokia’s handset sales, 37 percent, was in the Middle East and Africa, it said. But at 36 percent growth, sales were also strong in the Asia-Pacific region and in China.
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“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”
A crumpled note, delivered to a passing rock star-turned-philanthropist? No, Mr Sokor is a much sharper communicator than that. He texted this appeal from his own mobile phone to the mobiles of two United Nations officials, in London and
Nairobi. He got the numbers by surfing at an internet cafe at the North Kenyan camp.
As Mr Sokor’s bemused
London recipient points out, two worlds were colliding. The age-old scourge of famine in the Horn of Africa had found a 21st-century response; and a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been…
Tags: Africa, Caroline Hurford, cellular telephone, Dagahaley, food, food aid, internet cafe, London, mobile phones, Mohammed Sokor, Nairobi, North Kenyan camp, SMS, telephone networks, United Nations, World Food Programme.
How the technical, political and business realities in Africa hinder technological development and connectivity there.
Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web
Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.
A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet…
Tags: Africa, Britain, communications networks, fiber optic, high-speed Internet, high-speed Internet service, Internet access, Internet Age, Internet service, Internet traffic, Lawrence H. Landweber, Republic of South Africa, Rwanda, slower satellite technology, telecommunications, United States, University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin.
LIRNEasia decided to use a blog as its website rather than a conventional website. Website has done well so far; about 3,000 comments so far.
Some issues of importance:
Front page changes every two days, due to number of posts. Scrolling nature means that sometimes the most important topics do not remain at the top for long.
Weaknesses concerning retrieval of documents (unless you know exactly where it is).
Proposed structure:
Our website should be designed to meet Asia Pacific needs. Anything that does not fall under that purview will be handled by the other websites in the network.
Tags: Africa, Asia-Pacific, blog site, content management system, Google, key search terms, Latin America, mobile phones, search terms, web standards, www.3rasia.org.
For World Telecom and Information Society Day, I wrote a column on the wrong-headed telecenter policy being implemented by the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka with World Bank funds, where I referred to lessons from South Africa that were taken into account in the design, but ignored in the implementation. Here are some more lessons from Africa:
Creative destruction: izi killed the public phones « abaporu project on technology appropriation
All of a sudden, users don’t need the ‘public phones’ any more. In Senegal most of these télécentres have gone out of business. Bassirou Cissé, the general secretary of Unetts(*) says that “In 2000, there were 18,000 télécentres in Sénégal, accounting for 33% of the Senegalese operators’ revenues and 30,000 jobs. Today, most of them have closed down.”
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