Telecommunication Technology: Issues and Trends In West Africa

Published on: 15th Feb 2016 by Cellular-News India's Telecoms Ministry is seeking a 10 year tax holiday from the government in its forthcoming Union Budget, which would be aimed at attracting fresh investors to the country. The proposals from the Ministry also include an excise duty exemption to help boost local manufacturing of telecoms equipment. The 10-year tax holiday is estimated to encourage investments of around US$1 billion over the next three years. "Such proposals would be exempt from MAT (minimum alternate tax) as well for the same time frame," an official told the Economic Times newspaper. Extending the differential excise duty that's levied on mobile phones to electronic equipment such as network switches, routers and modems has also been proposed, the official added. The government has been pushing hard to encourage local manufacturing of mobile phones, and last year imposed an 11 percent levy on handsets imported into the country. Sinc...

 Recent report from ITU shows that about 1.4 billion smartphones will be sold at the close of 2015. This will exceed the sales of the PC, television, tablet and game console sectors combined, in terms of both units and revenue. The ITU, in its latest edition of Trends in Telecommunication Reform 2015, also reveals that one billion different kinds of wireless devices are expected to be shipped in 2015, up 60 per cent from 2014 figures to reach a predicted installed base of 2.8 billion connected devices by end 2015. Demand for tablets is expected to reach 234.5 million units in 2015. And while global shipments of PCs and laptops will to go into chronic global decline. Wearable devices are estimated to have reached 109 million by the beginning of 2015, according to the report. The report also predicts a fast-evolving ICT landscape, as devices and services proliferate, broadband connectivity becomes increasingly pervasive, and the hyper-connected world of the ‘Internet of Everythin...

The South African bourse has suspended trading in the shares of telecoms firm MTN on Monday, a senior official said, a week after the Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, slammed an unprecedented N1.04 trillion ($5.2 billion) fine on the telecom operator. “Yes, trading in MTN shares has been suspended and the information was broadcast across the trading platform,” said Peter Redman of the exchange’s surveillance department. MTN was fined last week by Nigerian regulator for failure to cut off unregistered and incomplete registered users MTN is Nigeria biggest phone operator, and the largest in Africa as well with its third earnings cumming from Nigeria alone. It has 5.1 million unregistered or incomplete subscribers in Nigeria. The NCC had in August directed mobile telecoms companies to deactivate all unregistered SIM cards or face severe sanctions. MTN missed the deadline to deactivate its 5.1 million unregistered subscribers, prompting a 200,000-naira ($1,000) fi...