Africa has become the first continent to have more mobile phone users than fixed-line subscribers.
A report has estimated that there will be 60 million people using mobile phones by the end of the year – more than double the 27 million who have a landline – despite the fact that half of Africans remain out of range of a cellular network.
A new survey by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) found that Africa had become the world’s fastest growing mobile phone market.
Over the past five years the continent’s mobile phone use has increased at an annual rate of 65%, twice the global average. Africa gained more than 13-million new cellphone subscribers in 2003, bringing its total to more than 52-million.
”Africa is by far the world’s fastest growing mobile market,” Michael Minges, the author of the ITU’s African Indicators report, said. ”Mobile communications have had a tremendous impact on improving Africans’ access to telecommunications.”
He said an important question was whether this rapid growth could be sustained.
The boom in mobile phones in Africa has surprised even the most optimistic observers.
One reason for the rapid growth is that the continent lags far behind the rest of the world in conventional, fixed-line telephone networks, and cellphone networks are much cheaper and faster to establish than stringing up telephone wires.
Just 2,8% of Africans have ordinary telephone services, the world’s lowest rate, while 6% use mobile phones.
”Africa has been able to leapfrog from having the most backward systems to taking advantage of the latest technologies,” Vanessa Gray, an ITU spokesperson, said.
”The challenge now is not just to increase the level of cellular phone use across Africa, but to increase access to the internet. The availability of information and data on the internet could be a significant boost to the continent’s development.”
The main hurdle to future growth is that large proportions of the untapped population are rural subsistence farmers whose income may not be sufficient to support a mobile phone network. – Guardian Unlimited Â