Continent braces for mobile traffic explosion

AFRICA’S biggest annual technology and telecoms gathering, the AfricaCom expo in Cape Town, closed this week with a powerful message about the future of connectivity on the continent.

By 2019, according to Fredrik Jejdling, head of Ericsson for sub-Saharan Africa, the continent will be closing in on a billion mobile subscriptions, of which 732 million will be broadband. About 476 million will be using smartphones.

The impact on the continent will be profound, said Jejdling in a keynote address.

Mobile traffic will grow 17fold as mobile banking and social media drives demand.

The big question on the minds of visitors was not new: how will networks cope with exploding demand?

Numerous solutions were on offer.

Ericsson took the opportunity to launch a new product called the Radio Dot, a small discshaped device that can be fitted anywhere inside any building with internal network cabling. While the Radio Dot is not the first to allow mobile network operators to deliver a strong cellular signal inside buildings, where reception usually deteriorates, it is the most portable, cost-effective and flexible answer to this problem yet.

“Customers are twice as likely to churn to other networks as a result of quality than as a result of price,” Jejdling told Business Times.

“If you can’t use your device and don’t have a signal, it’s a human reaction to look for alternatives. We realised a lot of the signal problems are indoor related, and we decided to develop a cost-effective and innovative system to take care of indoor traffic.”

He describes it as a “revolutionary product” because “it is frequency independent, can use installed infrastructure like computer network cables, and doesn’t need expensive wireless infrastructure”.

Improving signal quality was a central theme at AfricaCom, where exhibitors and speakers offered numerous solutions.