The wide-open spaces, followed by small pockets of densely populated areas in South Africa, will be the main driver behind the growth of wireless communications in this country... but crime will also play its part in driving this technology in SA.
This is according to Christopher Raps, DIGI Director of Business Development for Africa, APAC and ANZ, who explained why on a recent visit to the company's sole South African distributor, SPS South Africa.
Raps is of the opinion that this country will follow what is happening in Japan, Korea and China. He says SA is similar to those countries in that much of the population - often those who are not very well off - is contained in tiny apartments in just a few square kilometres of the city centres. There is simply no prospect for growing the PC market among these people due to lack of space in their living environment - as well as a shortage of cash. This is in contrast to the US, where a large proportion of the population owns a large PC with 17" monitor and all the peripherals.
In SA, the many miles of open countryside that separate city dwellers from rural folk also make it difficult to network the country by traditional telecoms means, including copper cabling. Also there is the uniquely African problem faced by the telcos, of theft of copper cabling and aluminium sheeting from the lines and structures, to make saleable goods and provide materials for shelter. "Wireless-based networks will do away with that problem as well," says Raps. "Oddly enough, crime could drive this mass technology."
The crime rate will also impact on purchasing decisions. "A cellphone has a limited value to steal, except for the person it belongs to." A thief will more likely steal a PC than a mobile phone, he believes, which will lead more people to go wireless than wired. The low per capita income of the whole of Africa, in line with Asia, will drive sales of mobile Internet, says Raps. "There is a huge opportunity out there, with a potential market of 44 million people in southern Africa alone."
If this country does go the way of the handheld PDA-like Internet access, it could only grow the economy, he believes. "The six-million IT market could jump to 15-18 million in the Internet-enabled phone market."
SA will follow the Asian lead in that "everything will be made portable and simple," Raps adds. Among the type of information that will be found on a wireless phone - as it is in Japan - will be SMS, access to local radio stations to hear the latest news and tunes, and simple means of keeping in touch with buddies to plan meeting places, for example.
He cites the example of Japan's NTT DoCoMo, the wireless unit of Japan's former phone monopoly and creator of the G3 technology, which offers a mobile Net access service that has taken Japan by storm since its February launch. Users purchase an i-mode handset and pay DoCoMo $3 a month for e-mail service and to display web text. By June DoCoMo had seven million users - which grew to over 13 million by mid-October. With i-mode, users are always connected, but pay only for the packets they download or send. New subscribers are joining at a rate of around 50 000 a day.
"We will soon find DoCoMo phones being exported from Japan to the rest of the world," says Raps. "That company has achieved, in just six months, with its i-mode technology, what Europe has been trying to do with WAP since its inception. Now it is working to partner in the Chinese and Korean markets, and is talking to potential partners in the US and Europe as well.
"The i-mode phones have become to Japanese 14-year-olds what Nintendo was to previous generations. Their phone has become like an arcade game. "DoCoMo could be the Cisco of wireless technology. It is a next generation Japanese company, competing with world companies."
Strangely enough, it has some similarities to our very own Telkom, says Raps, since NTT Japan is majority-owned by the government and comes from a similar bureaucratic and almost monopolistic way of thinking and management. The Chinese market may prove more difficult for DoCoMo's content providers, he says, being reminiscent as it is of the old South Africa in the height of the apartheid years. All information there is government-controlled.
Says Raps: "All ISPs must provide the government with a three-month record of what their subscribers have surfed, for fear of people visiting 'subversive' sites. Restrictions like this only benefit the storage manufacturers."
However, when this situation changes it will provide for an explosive market, as opposed to Russia, says Raps. Russia, with its glasnost, perestroika and Gorbachev, did the reverse. "There was no entrepreneurial base under the iron fist rule, so when it opened up, it became a mess. The Chinese, on the other hand, have been building their economy first before opening up. They still get only the most basic of services, but at the bottom of all that is a capitalist base. Capitalist companies can sell a lot of product and services into that country".
Overall, the winners in the wireless market will be "the Nokias of this world, and the mobile service providers, such as DoCoMo, the UK leader, Vodafone, and others, who will provide the medium for content - let the Yahoo's of the world fight about content". Those content providers that make use of technology that allows a web page to be split two ways - as a normal page for home browsers or into text only format for those surfing on their phones - will also succeed.
Raps says content will have to be a mix of both international and local subject matter and services. Achievers in this area could be freelance writers, developers, and games writers. And the loser is ... on-line advertising, says Raps. Mobile phone surfers will simply not have the patience to wait for the download of irritating, useless ads that hold no appeal for them.
Information provided by SPS South Africa, (011) 315 6892, sales@sps.co.za
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