Value Added Services: The Next Killer Application In West Africa

-



Hello Again!
Last time I was looking at where the market will be going in the Nigerian telecoms market and I predicted that the next gold mine will be Value addition with special emphases on Data services.

Today I intend to explore this a bit in detail, taking a global look on the market situation in the western sub- region of Africa.

Well with little hindsight, I can tell you that the WA is ripe for wireless Data explosion right now and may be the only solution for operators to solve the ever declining ARPU on voice networks. It may sound far fetched giving the poverty situation within the sub region but statistics on ground supports my views here.

The sub region is beset with a lot of decayed infrastructure, from poor road networks to poor power supply, but it has shown resilience in supporting the wireless market as current experience has shown.
The next push therefore is to bring internet to the doorstep of every home in Nigeria as the clear leader and the entire sub region. NCC is doing a great work in this regard and it is committed to bringing affordable data services to the poor and un-serviced in Nigeria. It has also gone further to show this commitment by the sell of the 2.3GHZ frequency for broadband wireless data at a very reasonable modified auction method. The goal being to reduce the total cost of ownership for a wireless broadband device and associated services.

With the population of 140 million plus for Nigeria 60% of which are youth and over 70% of this population within the productive sector the current data service subscriber of about 10 million is a far cry for the market capacity. But even this has shown a phenomenal increase from the miserly 200,000 at the end of 2000. Today the Nigeria internet users constitute about 18.5% of the total internet users in Africa.
In Sierra Leone for instance with a population of about 6m total internet subscribers as at today is 13,000 as compared with 5,000 as at Dec 2000 and in Senegal, the picture is not too different. Today’s population stands about 13 Million, total internet users at 820,000 compared with 40,000 in 2000. Ghana for instance has a population of about 23M with internet users as at December 2000 at 30T but now has over 880T users connect on the net. So you see that stage is set for an explosion.



Facts to note for today
Internet penetration for Africa =5.6%
World Average =23.8%
Rest of the world =26.9%
Source: InternetWorld stats

The Challenge: “what kind of solution will providers bring that can meet the need of the local market at an affordable rate’?
There is a clear need for innovation here. Some of this innovation will require proactive changes to the existing services offered by the GSM providers in this regards.
It will be nice to see for example
Black berry’s in Nigeria languages... Hausa, IBO, Yoruba
Providers leveraging on their infrastructure across WA to enhance e-commerce within the region
Hosting services that offers IPTV and educational services
Medical services by video online
With the coming of common currency as expected, then mobile money transfer and m-banking
Meanwhile my congratulation to Main One Cable coy For the Job they are currently doing to connect the west coast and Europe

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Quality of Service in the Nigerian Telecoms Space

-
Hi, It is my intention to do a series on the inefficient communication networks we have in Nigeria and I welcome comments on this.It is over eight years now since the introduction of GSM and other mobile network services in Nigeria, given birth to a number of operators in the industry.While NCC has been largely successful in selling communication licenses to would be operators and existing ones, it has not met with equal success in regulating these kinds and quality of networks being rolled out in Nigeria. This have subjected the industry to a number of speculations, bad and poorly designed networks and equipment flooding the market with the attendant poor quality of services from all the operators , leaving the subscribers to the mercies of these operators whose only goal is profit, profit and moor profit.In these series I will like to pursue the causes of these poor qualities of services in the Nigerian telecom industry and perhaps proffer some solution to these problems. While some
Read more

4G Technologies

-
Image
The 4G is the fourth generation of cellular wireless standards. It is used broadly to include several type of broadband wireless access communication not only cellular telephone system.4G is an IP-based heterogeneous network. One of the terms used to describe 4G is “MAGIC”, M-Mobile Multimedia A-Anytime anywhere G-Global mobility Support I-Integrated wireless solution and C-Customized personal service While most of us are used to getting high speed Internet connections at home, the office or even the local cafe, once we are on the road those high speeds have to stay behind. With 4G the promise is that you can get real mobile broadband to go. In this piece I am going to tell you all about the technology and its benefits. But first, some background: 4G is the short name for fourth-generation wireless, the stage of mobile communications that will enable things like IP-based voice, data, gaming services and high quality streamed multimedia on portable devices with cable mode
Read more

The Future of the Telecoms market in Nigeria

-
Let me take a critical look at the market trends with a view of looking into the future going forward. The Nigerian Telecoms market has performed excellently well since the introduction of mobile telephony into the space especial the GSM operators. From a Paltry 400,000 installed capacity in 1997 to a whooping 85M lines today, the market has done well beyond expectation. What were the major drivers of the Market? 1 Available total hungry Market of over 100M subscribers yearning for Telco services which were unavailable 2 Government liberalization of the space 3 A transparent frequency licensing regime by NCC 4 A growing young and vibrant population, highly literate and highly mobile 5 A reasonable economic leverage within the population, that enabled them afford the services 6 Vibrant operators , offering mouth watering incentives in the form of mobile lottery in most instances What are the inhibiting factors to Growth and affordability? 1 Lack of basic Infrastructure
Read more