Telecom in Africa to grow robustly in 2009 - TWC

Accra, Feb. 25, GNA - The African telecommunications industry is expected to grow robustly in 2009, after seeing 19 million net additions to the wireless market in 2008, US-based Telecom World Congress (TWC) said on Thursday.

A statement covering an invitation to Chief Technical Officers (CTOs) of telecom service providers in particular and other industry players in general to the Fourth TWC conference dubbed TWC 2009 slated for April 21-24 in Amsterdam, noted that the huge increase in the number of wireless subscribers last year had set the tone for exciting times in the industry on the continent this year. "While many planned hardware and software are being rolled out at a slower pace in Europe, the number of mobile subscriptions in Africa is surging," it said.

It also noted that many fixed-line networks were beginning to offer real alternatives to wireless and satellite subscriptions, creating an even more competitive market on the continent. The statement noted that industry players, particularly, mobile phone service providers, would have to go the extra mile to provide high quality service to maintain and improve on their stake in the market. It said now was the time for mobile service providers to draw on the experiences of the developed markets, particularly in the area of Next Generation Networking (NGN) such as Third Generation (3G), 3.5 Generation (3.5G) and Fourth Generation (4G) services to guide their investments into NGN upgrading.

It therefore urged industry players in Africa to take advantage of this year's TWC to learn practical lessons from the successes and mistakes of their counterparts in the developed markets in order to take better decisions on what kind of NGN technology to buy, when and how.

The statement said over 100 CTOs had already registered to attend the conference, which promised to provide answers to questions like: "What are the big technology considerations for Africa in 2009? What can be learned from the mistakes and success stories worldwide that can be transferred to Africa? What should operations procure and what can be out on the 'backburner' in the next 12 months?"

The TWC event is an excellent source of information on the latest developments, trends, and key players in telecommunications, placing Africa in international context.

Identifying Africa's strengths and weaknesses, it offers rigorous analysis of broadband technologies and markets and reviews the impact of new NGN and Internet Protocol (IP) technologies.

There are lots of telecom operators in Africa, six of which have operations in Ghana, each of them a multi-national. Whiles each of the six had licenses for some NGN services, five of them - MTN, Globacom, Zain, Tigo and Vodafone - have been granted licenses by the National Communications Authority (NCA) for 3.5G services and two, MTN and Zain, launched their 3.5G technologies in January 2009, while Vodafone has signed a US$120 million deal with Huawei for the supply of 3.5G technology equipment. The sixth operator in Ghana is Kasapa.

3.5G, also known as the High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA), which runs on a Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), has higher data transfer speeds and capacity. It also enables video calls, video conferencing and permanent internet connectivity. Whiles the industry players are busy investing huge sums into 3.5G, information from the developed markets indicate that players in those markets were sceptical about investments into Next Generation Mobile Networking (NGMN) technology in general for fear of the uncertainty as to how many subscribers can afford to and/or are interested in NGMN services. 25 Feb. 09