Season's Greetings From Balancing Act's News Update

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

seasons greetings from balancing acts news update

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

2013 - a connection telecom retrospective

2013 was the year of sharp fibre price cuts, causing a spike in fibre-to-the-building installations that will cause a steep rise in the number of businesses – big and small – with access to true symmetrical high-performance broadband.

A 1 Mbps service can cost as little as R1500 for installation and R 1500 in monthly subscription fees, and is available from providers including Internet Solutions and Neotel.

Having fibre makes a company’s transition to voice over IP infinitely easier, as the speed and other performance improvements remove much of the hassle of engineering VoIP.

Fibre’s superior response times further contribute to VoIP’s attraction. Analogue access lines have an inherent delay in the modulation-demodulation process. For their part, digital circuits have latency delays in the low hundreds of milliseconds, while fibre is orders of magnitude faster, with latency as low as 1.5 to 2ms.

Reflecting this trend, we are noticing a rise in a new kind of niche network provider that specialises in pulling fibre from the kerb into business premises. Communications service providers will have to work out pricing models that allow this development to flourish.

Another important trend relating to fibre costs is the launch of a number of new north-south fibre services. FibreCo Telecommunications, for example, completed its fibre-optic network in November, interconnecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, East London and Cape Town and providing more cost effective open-access fibre.

Together, these two events will dismantle one of the biggest inhibitors to adopting fibre connectivity – cost – heralding great benefit for communications in this country.

source: www.itnewsafrica.com

India is vodafone's 2nd largest country in data traffic, 3G is 30% of data traffic

India is now Vodafone’s second largest business in terms of data traffic. This was disclosed by Vodafone Group CTO Steve Pusey during the company’s earnings conference call last week.

He added that India accounted for around 40 petabytes of the total 85 petabytes data traffic in the AMAP (Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific Region) region in the first half year, doubling year on year (YoY).

Last week, the telco had reported a moderate increase in its data subscriptions, clocking 42.5 million data subscriptions of which 4.5 million were 3G subscriptions. The data revenues however had declined to £111 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2013, down from £123 million in the previous quarter.

Later in the call, Nick Read, Vodafone CEO (Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific Region) said its 3G browsing revenues are up 190% for this quarter and the smartphone penetration of its customer base has increased by 40% since the start of FY14. 3G traffic now accounts for 30% of the total data traffic. ”We see a massive opportunity now in terms of ARPU uplift, and in terms of further growth coming from India for the operators that are willing to put significant investment in data networks, especially in the urban areas.”

- Vodafone plans to setup 27,000 3G sites and extend its outdoor 3G coverage to over 90% of urban areas in India. The company also plans to extend its 3G coverage to 200 new towns in the country. There are also plans to setup 14,000 2G sites and roll out 14,000 km of fibre across 40 Indian cities, which will be extended t0 100 cities later.

- Read noted the top three operators have started to increase their existing market share and currently account for 66% of the revenues for the quarter. “As the smaller players, the more vulnerable players, leave the circles, or the market completely, we are able to grab more of the minutes and more of the customers in a dual SIM environment”.

source: medianama.com