WiMAX used to be the technology of choice for data insurgent challengers but now they seem to be shifting to LTE.
West African ISPs Surfline (in Ghana) and YooMee (Cote d’Ivoire) both look like stealing a march on the mobile operators with LTE roll-outs early next year.
Russell Southwood spoke to YooMe Africa’s CEO Dov Bar Gera about what the company is looking at doing.
YooMe is a privately held Swiss company that has two African ISP operations, one in Cameroon and the other to open shortly in Cote d’Ivoire. In the past CEO Dov Bar Gera has set up and sold ISP operations in Eastern Europe before moving his focus to Africa.
Its Cameroon operation has deployed WiMAX 16e and it claims to have covered 85% of the population in the country’s two main cities, Douala and Yaounde with 20 base stations. Its main competitors are the two mobile operators (MTN and Orange) and a handful of smaller ISPs.
It has taken significant market share, having around 20,000 out of the 50,000 broadband subscribers in the country if you define broadband as over 512 kbps download speed. Overall Bar Gera estimates that there are probably around a million Cameroonians who use the Internet at least once a week.
But there is a cap on growth as the monopoly international bandwidth provider Camtel has not yet reduced its wholesale prices:”Because of this monopoly, international bandwidth is 5-7 times more expansive (than in other more competitive countries)”. Obviously higher wholesale prices lead to more expensive retail prices, which in turn means a smaller market.
source: www. bussinesstech.co
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