The Enhancement of Communications in Africa
 Colin Orviss, Vice Chairman, TM Forum
Management World Africa Chairman
Conference Day 1
Communications is one of the primary foundations for enabling economic viability within a country and for improving the information wealth of people within a region. The African continent is, by world standards, substantially underserved with fixed line infrastructures in the main not being able to service the needs for the business or residential communities. There are some obvious exceptions in the continent although even in the well served countries, it is mainly the urban areas that benefit from decent coverage.
Along with other geographies, many parts of Africa over the past years have seen significant growth and benefited from the deployment of new mobile networks, most often based on 3G technology. This has been fuelled by people wanting access to a mobile phone that fulfils a social and economic need while also acting as a status symbol.
Licensed spectrum is, however, one of the tools used by the government to control the expansion and penetration of communications – social service rather than luxury toy. There needs to be a greater recognition, however, that information enablement in general enriches the life of the community and provides a greater opportunity for socio-economic enhancement. Therefore, given the cost to build networks that cover as much of a population as possible, the possibility of infrastructure / bandwidth sharing should be discussed and encouraged to ensure that a higher degree of penetration is obtained. The main question revolves around the optimum model for promoting competition, the technology foundation and how to ensure fair and reasonable coverage. In addition, enabling the establishment of (M)VNO’s is something that helps with increasing access to the masses.
Given the range of demographics in the continent, there is no single answer to what is best for the populace and how much bandwidth is enough. The reason for speaking in bandwidth terms is that although talking and SMS are the main reasons why the initial communications device is purchased, more and more, the device is being used to improve awareness through information enablement. Information enablement covers the domains of internet access for information gathering (education, weather, news, products, etc.), social networking, information exchange, etc., media distribution (IPTV) and commerce (business interactions, transactions, etc.).
There are questions, however, as to the ability of the existing infrastructure to extend to fulfilling what is expected to be a growing demand for the faster access speeds associated with broadband and the data volumes associated with media information exchange. This is where technology extensions around HSDPA and WiMAX come into play to provide high speed connectivity and the real enablement of the wireless internet. In many parts of the continent, WiMAX is being used as both a backhaul and access technology and it is expected that Africa will end up being one of the highest penetrated geographies of this technology over the coming years.
Foreign Operators are eyeing the potential for growth in Africa as a new business opportunity to overcome some of the challenges they have in their own markets from competitive pressures and the resulting churn. Although knowledge of operational models and understanding of technologies is something that they have, their knowledge of some of the local challenges especially related to disposable income is something that they cannot easily adapt to. The Indian Operators, however, are in a different position since they have a good understanding of how to deploy good value / quality services at a low cost. The interest by Indian companies in some of the existing Operators in the African continent is a testament to this.
How the local Operators respond to this competition will have a profound affect on their ability to prosper, and understanding some of the key issues around enhancing both their networks and information systems is critical. The TM Forum addresses just these issues in the standards it defines for operational models and information systems and by providing a forum for both the Operator community and the vendors to discuss alternative approaches.
Management World Africa, is the TM Forum’s first dedicated conference to the African continent, where senior representatives from Operators in the region and international experts will exchange ideas on how to address these local opportunities and challenges.
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