Africa has 12% of the world's population and only 3% of its telephone lines. Neil Davis, technical director at CreditPipe, says that while mobile technology is closing the gap, some network operator issues are looming. The biggest challenge in African telecommunications has been infrastructure. It is almost impossible to run fixed lines to many locations due to various geo-political and social issues, such as crime, distance and the harsh environment.
The result has been two blocks of developed telecommunications infrastructure on the continent: one in southern Africa and the other in North Africa.
However, even in these blocks, telecom costs still remain an issue. Due to the development of these two areas, separated by great distance and the lack of reliable infrastructure between them, overland telecommunications links have proven difficult to establish. Two methods have been devised to work around this: satellite communications and undersea cable.
SAT2 and SAT3/WASC (Southern Africa - Western Africa Submarine Cable) currently offer 80 GB of bandwidth along Africa's west coast, linking Europe, northern and southern Africa to India and Malaysia. The remaining problem is that countries inland do not have access to the cables and rely entirely on satellite for passing telecommunications traffic to the submarine cables.
Due to this, cellular networks have been widely deployed in African states. According to a report by Paul Budde Communications, 2004 Telecoms in Africa, the continent's low population density has made these wireless systems more economical than fixed line and they have grown at twice the international rate. The report adds that most African states have just one, state-owned fixed-line telecommunications operator, while many already have multiple cellular networks competing with one another, which has fuelled the growth of cellular networks and services, as well as reduced their price.
This core infrastructure is rapidly becoming established and once it is, there will be no restriction to access.
Data always follows voice on communications networks, and higher speed wireless data transfer is already becoming a reality with the introduction of new-edge technologies that will push data throughput across a wireless link up to 384 Kbps. With higher wireless data throughput speeds, these services can be rolled out to more remote areas, but while the technology is becoming available, the pricing models are not conducive to large-scale rollouts.
Economies of scale suggest that this is not set to change in the near future. The second disincentive to that changing is that existing users have already accepted the costs of mobile or wireless communications. Taking South Africa as an example, even with a second network operator, there is unlikely to be a huge cost reduction in mobile telecommunications. But the fact that all base stations must transmit their traffic across fixed lines introduces the next issue: bottlenecks.
Wireless data throughput is set to surge with the introduction of new technologies such as WiBurst, which will effectively transfer at 40 Mbps. Currently being piloted in Australia, South Africa and Mexico, it does not yet have the backing of major equipment vendors and network operators. But the fact remains that high-throughput wireless networks are on the horizon.
Fixed lines between base stations are currently limited to 32 Mbps transfer speeds, so with wireless network cells transferring data from multiple users, throughput is quickly throttled. What is needed to stop this swamping of the core network, is a broadband core such as that deployed in the US.
For more information contact Neil Davis, CreditPipe, +27 (0)11 652 6350, ndavis@creditpipe.com
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