Kathy Gibson reports from AfricaCom in Cape Town – In the networked society, 50-billion devices will be connected by 2020.Frederik Jejdling, president: Ericsson sub-Saharan Africa, points to a massive opportunity for Africa. In fact, the rate of change in ICT readiness is the fastest in Lagos, but Johannesburg is also moving fast, according to the latest Ericsson Networked Society Cities Index.
Across Africa, the mobile networks are growing at double and even triple rates, he says, with mobile subscriptions set to reach 930-million by 2019.
Mobile broadband will be the key to enabling the networked society in Africa, Jejdling adds. This will be driven by the 650-million people currently unconnected on the continent, the fact that 80% of African adults are still unbanked; and the growing demand for multimedia services.
Smartphones open the world of information to users. “It’s driven by a basic human need in Africa,” says Jejdling. Mobile apps for the region tend to focus on education, health and agriculture rather than platforms like Facebook.
In fact, 61% of mobile users in Africa believe that their mobile phone allows them to access information they would otherwise not be able to access.
Financial inclusion also drives mobile usage, with mobile banking finding huge traction in Africa.
The platform can also allow more affordable media. Television is currently unavailable and massively unaffordable for many Africans, Jejdling points out, so a new way of distributing and consuming media needs to be found.
The key elements that will drive mobile broadband on the continent, he says, are devices and local content, national broadband plans by government and regulators, high-performing networks, and ICT in key sectors.
“Collaboration is important to make this work,” he adds. This collaboration needs to be among technology providers, service providers and policy-makers.
“We think collaborating around these issues is something we need to do among ourselves.”
Jejdling believes is a basic human need to communicate, bank and access media, so all stakeholders have an interest in making it succeed.
Mobile broadband access, combined with affordable devices and industry transformation will lead to the realisation of the mobile broadband dream, Jejdling says.
LTE is being slowly rolled out across Africa, and is often hailed as the answer to mobile broadband challenges.
Jannie van Zyl, executive head: innovation at Vodacom, explains that most LTE networks are deployed in high frequencies so they are not well limited to rural areas, and this needs to be addressed.
Although services are being developed, he says it’s hard to tell what services will be developed for LTE networks. The networks can’t dictate on what customers do with the networks. But we do know they will always push the boundaries and push the network to the limits.
Miguel Soares, CMO of Unitel Angola, points out that, while its different running a network in Angola versus either South Africa or Europe, the users are not much different in demanding the best speed and quality possible.
Deploying LTE not only provides broadband to users, but also improves the management of the network and optimisation of resources, he says, while users will look for new use cases for the increased speed and capacity.
By the end of 2015, Unitel Angola will have more than 50% of its network running LTE.
Paul Carter-Brown, CEO of Smile, says that price is important in Africa, but quality and speed plays a big role in how broadband is deployed.
Smile is unusual among mobile operators in that it has tried to simplify its price plans to offer transparency to the user.
“There is certainly a business opportunity to be an LTE operator in Africa right now,” Carter-Brown says.
At least 95% of households in Cameroon and Ivory Coast are not yet connected – and that’s in the big cities, says Dov Bar-Gera, group CEO of YooMee.
In these environments, providing connectivity is just one part of the exercise: there is a lot of education that needs to be done for users, governments and regulators.
Monopolies provide a challenge in many African markets as well, sometimes controlling the pricing or availability of broadband.
It’s also important for operators to help their markets to develop content, and particularly local content in local languages, Bar-Gera says.
Although mobile banking seems to be the big opportunity in Africa, few operators are offering the service, although YooMee is trying to work with financial institutions in offering payment services, and Vodacom offers M-Pesa.
Safari’s M-Pesa is the big financial success story in Kenya, and is seeing strong growth in the rest of Africa.
Van Zyl believes that banking will tend to be successful if users trust the organisation. “It’s an area that’s prime for the operators to disrupt the traditional banks,” he says. “I think it’s probably one of the biggest disruptions that operators will impose on the banking sector.”
Changes to the LTE standard are being made to allow for machine to machine connectivity.
Vodacom has a substantial machine to machine network, although Van Zyl says most of this in on the 2G networks
“We do see a substantial move to 3G, but don’t see a strong uptake in machine to machine connectivity on LTE,” he says. “I’m not sure if LTE is the correct technology for machine to machine. I wouldn’t be surprised to see another technology coming up for the machine to machine space.”
Other mobile operators agree that LTE will be deployed initially to connect people; and that machine to machine connectivity will come later and possibly not on the LTE networks.