The pace of change in the telecoms and internet sectors in Africa in 2013 has seemed to accelerate. The established and accepted ways of doing things are being challenged on all sides by both global trends and by things that are particular to Africa.
Infrastructure plans continue to fall into place. Liquid Telecom looks close to realizing the imperial fantasy of Rhodes by having a fibre route from the Cape to Cairo. Google has built a metronet in Kampala as a way of accelerating market development and looks set to roll out more. Somalia will shortly be connected to international fibre. Fibre to the home or whatever implementations are growing in number: Telkom South Africa has graciously signaled it will join the party, late as ever. Soon as one senior executive told us, the experience for corporate customers in most African capitals will be almost the same as in Europe of the USA. In the meantime, vandalism and power cuts bedevil the progress made.
There is a very real danger that as the digital divide begins to be closed that it will turn into a power divide. There are many efforts at the level of the base station and small-scale local delivery but none of the policy dynamism that has driven the telecoms and Internet sectors in the best performing countries. Many Governments seem to have a rhetoric about joining the Information Society but lack the political will to solve the energy requirements to deliver it. A recent workshop of 42 African countries convened by the African Development Bank for an initiative called Sustainable Energy for All in Africa may be a good thing but we want to see what it's actually going to deliver on the ground.
source: www.allafrica.com
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