Telecommunication Technology: Issues and Trends In West Africa

By THOMAS GRYTA U.S. wireless carriers are working on a new way to deliver voice calls to make their networks more efficient. While carriers have spent tens of billions of dollars developing and marketing their data networks, wireless voice calls still use technology rolled out more than 10 years ago. Older networks were built for voice traffic with a data pipe running through it, but newer networks are for data only. To maximize efficiency, carriers aim to eliminate the dedicated voice channels needed by older technology and clear the airwaves for the latest standard, called long-term evolution, or LTE. To do this, companies are taking on the multiyear process of converting voice calls into Internet traffic so the same airwaves can be used for voice or data. "As an industry, we spent 20 years building for voice capacity and 10 years fixing it that so that it would work for mobile data," said John Byrne, an...

There are about 1.6 billion mobile broadband connections today. Five years from now, there will be more than three times that many — 5.1 billion — and they’ll be generating a ton of revenue for the companies that provide them. That’s the word from the GSMA, which cited those metrics in the Mobile Economy 2013 report it released this morning as Mobile World Congress kicked off in Barcelona. According to the GSMA, worldwide mobile operator data revenue will exceed that of voice by 2017. And in countries like the U.S. and the U.K. it will do so even more quickly — perhaps as soon as 2014. Argentina’s data revenue will exceed voice this year . Driving that surge in usage: The proliferation of smartphones and tablets, particularly lower-end models. Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous in developed and emerging markets, and are creating a vast appetite for wireless broadband. “Mobile data is not just a commodity,” GSMA CM...

Published on: 28th Feb 2013 ­New smartphone sales data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech shows Windows gaining popularity with consumers, growing its user base in the UK by almost 700,000 in the past year - an increase of 240%. In the three months to January 2013 Windows' share of the smartphone market has grown to over 6% in Great Britain, up from 2.4% the previous year, and 14.0% in Italy. Although iOS and Android continue to take the lion's share of smartphone sales in Great Britain, accounting for 30.6% and 56.2% of purchases in the latest data, Windows phones are now selling in significant quantities. Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, explains: "Nokia is spearheading this growth, with the Lumia 800 the leader among the Windows handsets. However, it is not the only manufacturer benefitting from the increasing popularity of Windows. HTC's 8X is now the third bestselling Windows device in Great Britain, de...