FortySouth

Africa has registered one of the highest annual growth rates in global mobile subscribers over the last decade.

According to the 2008 ITU ICT Indicators report, Africa..

• has some 280 million total telephone subscribers, of which some 260 million (over 85%) are mobile cellular subscribers, representing the continent with the highest ratio of mobile to total telephone subscribers of any region in the world.

• is the region with the highest mobile cellular growth rate (worldwide). Growth over the past 5 years averages almost 65% year on year.

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Gartner Inc. has released a report of mobile technologies that will be quickly evolving over the next two years that may pose some issues on short-term strategies and policies.

• Bluetooth 3.0 – Likely to be released in 2009 with compatible devices becoming available in 2010. Will feature low power consumption and faster transfer rates up to 480Mbits/s in close proximity.
• Mobile User Interface – Organizations should expect more user demands for support of specific device models driven by interface preferences. They will also be an area of intense competition in 2009 and 2010, with manufacturers using UIs to differentiate their handsets and platforms. Continue reading

Google has partnered with Open Technology Institute, PlanetLab Consortium and other academic researchers to release tools designed for measuring the performance of your internet connection, developed under the Measurement Lab.

• Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) – measures your broadband speeds and identifies common network problems
• Glasnost – tests if your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent traffic
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis (NPAD) – diagnoses some of the common problems effecting the last network mile and end-users’ systems
• DiffProbe (coming soon) – tests to see if your ISP is prioritizing or degrading certain traffic (traffic shaping)
• NANO (coming soon) – attempts to detect whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations

In the US, Comcast has in the past run into problems with the FCC for content discrimination, particularly of P2P streams. Cox is also not coy about it traffic shaping policies.

These tools are essential to helping you figure out if you are getting the internet service from your provider that you paid for.