Business
Africa’s race for data – making sense of the transition through everyday services today
Put the foot on the accelerator for maximum growth in both the volume of data and the number of users. Encourage all the international and local social networking brands because these are the “must-have” products, which have been persuading people to use data, sometimes without realizing that’s what they’re doing. Also think about those social networking products like Flickr and Pinterest that require people to transfer photos to the cloud.
Wireless access in Africa has come on by leaps and bounds in the last five years but operators and their partners need to make near universal Wi-Fi access in urban areas a driving business priority. There should be almost nowhere where people gather that they cannot get a signal.
Ideally these signals need to be bundled in such a way that there is access to packages that offer the equivalent of universal roaming. People need to be able to turn to this access whether they are in a taxi or a market and not feel constrained by artificial limits: bring an end to capacity bundles and people will not hesitate to do things using data.
The first step along the road to data is the introduction of video on phones using LTE. You Tube is already widely used despite the fact that bandwidth has not kept up with it. It should be made the key application to drive LTE as a mass market product.
The next stage on this road is leaving behind old revenues. One of the operators who spoke at Africa Telecoms Forum recently said for the first time that SMS (text messaging) will be phased out as a service. Instead actually encourage people to migrate to services like What’s App and offer simpler e-mail applications that run from address books.
The last step in this transition is either offering bundled data voice services or reaching deals with existing operators like Skype and Fring. It’s important to make this not a plan B or C service but something users want to turn to first.
Finally, whatever people say about mobile being the dominant device in Africa, there will be an increased desire amongst Africa’s middle classes for things like high speed DSL or fibre to the home to deliver TV packages as well as voice and Internet.
So how does the money thing work, I hear you asking yourself? Well if currently someone is paying US$5-10 a month, the aim is to get back approximately that same amount (or slightly more) from these customers by getting them to pay for data rather than voice or SMS. Timescale? 3-5 years so this is not some theoretical future discussion but something you need to be doing now.
