FortySouth

Om Malik posits:

“Building new cables is the equivalent to adding new roads, new shipping lanes, or flights. The undersea fibers of today are what sea trading routes were in the past—an indicator of future economic activity and a subsequent boom”

That during the 90′s a “grotesque number of” undersea fibre optic cables were laid connecting the US, Japan Europe and parts of Asia Pacific. Those three regions then went through an economic boom due to telecom deregulation and increased spending on ICT initiatives.
Right now I believe we are seeing the counterpoint in Africa. A number undersea fibre projects are in progress, many more competitors in the service provider arena are entering the market challenging erstwhile telco giants to repackage their business models and service offerings.
What is quite notable in Africa is the unprecedented growth in the number of mobile subscribers over the last decade and I tend to agree with Om’s assessment that the bulk 13 terrabits per second-odd capacity that the fibre options will bring to fore, will be used by mobile broadband services since “PC penetration is (still) abysmally low” in the continent.
Photo credit: aolcdn.com

RwandaTel, a mobile service provider in Rwanda, recently announced their rolling out of a GSM cellular network. This is without a doubt fantastic news for the country because it means more options for subscribers, greater penetration levels and competitive pricing among the players.
Not to rain on the parade but, if in infact the cellular network is based on the 2G standard, why a GSM network?
I know this may be construed as oversimplifying the debate, and indeed there could legit rationale behind the approach – the fact that GSM still has a close to 80% global market share of cellular networks which may serve well for interoperability. The caveat with GSM is that its underlying technology is TDMA, which allocates time slices for users to utilize the transmission channel. A more efficient channel-access technology would be CDMA-based (cdma2000 or W-CDMA standards), which allows multiple users to utilize the entire channel at once. The most common analogy for this is to consider several people in a room holding multiple conversations. With TDMA, only one user can speak at a time; once his talk time is up, he goes quiet and another begins. This way the listener does not get confused about who is speaking. With CDMA several people speak all at once, but in different languages so only those that understand the language will pick it up.
CDMA essentially makes more efficient use of the channel, provides greater bandwidth and the requisite infrastructure is relatively less costly to deploy and maintain.
My $.02 on this is that for a new network being set up, it would be more beneficial to pursue a network based on a 3G standard such as CDMA2000 or the 3G successor of GSM – UMTS (WCDMA-based). In any case, most erstwhile GSM providers are moving in this direction, take Kenya’s Safaricom for instance.

According to an ITU report on Telecommunication/ICT Markets and Trends in Africa, out of 1.1 billion internet users worldwide in 2006, Africa had 44 million or 3.8%. At the same point in time, while the world had 281 million broadband subscribers, Africa registered 1 million or about 0.4%.

In Asia the numbers stood at 104 million, 89 million in Europe and 80 million in the Americas. Growth in this sector has been hampered by high tarrifs and limited computer literacy.

Mobile telephony on the other hand has seen great advances in the last decade with significant year-on-year growth in penetration with subscribers per 100 inhabitants of 22.0. In 2006, Africa’s share stood at 7.2% of the 1.1 billion mobile subscribers.

The Telecommunication market in Africa is on the up-tick with a number of undersea fibre optic cable projects underway (SEACOM, TEAMS and EASSY) and increased competition among mobile service providers.

With mobile telephony currently outpacing growth in other ICT services, could the future (short-term, at least) of ICT in Africa be in wireless?