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domingo, outubro 16, 2005
Cell phones provide African solutions to African problems
...
The numbers are staggering.
Cell phones made up 74.6 percent of all African phone subscriptions last year, says the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union. Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in 2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western Europe, according to Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese who chairs Celtel, a leading African provider.
An industry that barely existed 10 years ago is now worth $25 billion, he says. Prepaid air minutes are the preferred means of usage and have created their own $2 billion-a-year industry of small-time vendors, the Celtel chief says. Air minutes have even become a form of currency, transactable from phone to phone by text message, he says.
This is particularly useful in Africa, where transferring small amounts of money through banks is costly.
"We are developing unique ways to use the phone, which has not been done anywhere else," says South African Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, one of two service providers in Kenya. For an impoverished continent, low-cost phones make "a perfect fit."
And cash-strapped governments which have had to give up their monopoly on land lines are looking to reap huge revenues from license fees, customs duties and taxes on calls.
"We all misread the market," Joseph said.
The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on
GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed.
The real reason for weak demand was that land lines were expensive, subscribers had to wait for months to get hooked up, and the lines often went down because of poor maintenance, floods and theft of copper cables.
Cell phones slice through all those obstacles and provide African solutions to African problems.
...
Cell Phone Use Changes Life in Africa - Yahoo! News
The numbers are staggering.
Cell phones made up 74.6 percent of all African phone subscriptions last year, says the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union. Cell phone subscriptions jumped 67 percent south of the Sahara in 2004, compared with 10 percent in cell-phone-saturated Western Europe, according to Mo Ibrahim, the Sudanese who chairs Celtel, a leading African provider.
An industry that barely existed 10 years ago is now worth $25 billion, he says. Prepaid air minutes are the preferred means of usage and have created their own $2 billion-a-year industry of small-time vendors, the Celtel chief says. Air minutes have even become a form of currency, transactable from phone to phone by text message, he says.
This is particularly useful in Africa, where transferring small amounts of money through banks is costly.
"We are developing unique ways to use the phone, which has not been done anywhere else," says South African Michael Joseph, chief executive officer of Safaricom, one of two service providers in Kenya. For an impoverished continent, low-cost phones make "a perfect fit."
And cash-strapped governments which have had to give up their monopoly on land lines are looking to reap huge revenues from license fees, customs duties and taxes on calls.
"We all misread the market," Joseph said.
The mistake, providers say, was to make plans based on
GDP figures, which ignore the strong informal economy, and to assume that because land line use was low, little demand for phones existed.
The real reason for weak demand was that land lines were expensive, subscribers had to wait for months to get hooked up, and the lines often went down because of poor maintenance, floods and theft of copper cables.
Cell phones slice through all those obstacles and provide African solutions to African problems.
...
Cell Phone Use Changes Life in Africa - Yahoo! News
posted by CMT, 11:24 da tarde
