Standstill looms for mobile data traffic

IN the mid-1990s, there were fewer telephone connections in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa than there were in Manhattan. What a difference two decades have made: by the end of this year, there will be more than 635 million active telephone subscriptions on the subcontinent. That number is twice the population of the entire US.

The impact on Africa of the boom in mobile telecommunications has been vast. The Kenyan and Tanzanian economies, for example, now literally run on top mobile devices, thanks to money-transfer service MPesa. Hundreds of millions of Africans are connecting to the internet for the first time using their phones, many of them smartphones, whose prices have plummeted to below $100 (about R1 070) and continue to fall.

Swedish telecoms equipment maker Ericsson, in its latest Mobility Report, predicts that by 2019 the number of mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa will have risen to 930 million. More significantly, smartphones — powered by broadband networks — are expected to

This means ‘higher service costs and compromised quality of service’

displace “feature” phones in the coming years.

According to Ericsson, the number of 2G, non-broadband devices in use in the region will peak at just more than 500 million this year. The number will start dropping as 3G devices come to dominate the market. It will take longer for 4G to gain traction because of higher device prices and spectrum scarcity.

By the end of the decade, broadband-ready phones will have largely replaced 2G devices, Ericsson predicts. There will be about 600 million 3G subscriptions in Africa by then.

At the end of 2019, 65% of subSaharan Africans will be covered by a 3G network, up from 20% now, and 4G networks will reach 40% of the population, up from just 5% now. But 2G coverage will continue to expand, reaching 80% by 2019, from 65% now. Between 2013 and 2019, data traffic traversing mobile operators’ networks will jump twentyfold, compared with tenfold globally.

The significance of this boom in mobile broadband is hard to overstate. According to the report, mobile broadband is already the main way in which many consumers in subSaharan Africa access the internet.

“About 70% of mobile users in the countries researched in the region browse the web on their devices in comparison to 6% who use desktop computers.”

By the end of this decade, the majority of African consumers will carry a device — many of these will have a large-screen display, ideal for online use — that can access the internet at decent speeds. This will transform industries. New businesses — in media, financial services and elsewhere — will emerge to cater for the hundreds of millions of Africans looking for access to new services.

According to the Ericsson report, the increasing sophistication of social networking platforms — international providers such as Facebook and WhatsApp and home-grown solutions like Mxit — has played a big role in the growth of mobile data traffic. As in other parts of the world, further growth will be propelled by video.

But there is a bottleneck ahead. Most African governments — South Africa’s included — have been too slow to license new radio frequency spectrum to allow operators to cater for exploding demand. Unless this changes soon, the data-growth express train could be derailed.

Too many countries, including South Africa, are way behind with their digital television projects and others, like Kenya, have botched their roll-outs. This means it will be years before many countries in the region can allocate the “digital dividend” — the prime broadband spectrum now occupied by analogue TV broadcasters.

Developed markets are powering ahead with licensing this spectrum, but African policymakers and regulators — with some exceptions — are handicapping the continent by not getting a move on with digital migration. This means “added traffic congestion, delays in network rollout, higher service costs and overall compromised quality of service”, according to the Ericsson report.

It would be a great pity if the mobile broadband boom — which will change Africa more profoundly than it has the developed world— is choked off just as it is getting going.

McLeod edits TechCentral.co.za. Find him on Twitter @mcleodd