It’s hard not to get excited about the explosion in cellular telephony. Africa is now the world’s fastest-growing region for mobile telecoms. Thus crowed the industry’s cocks in front of the crowds at an international conference in Cairo last week.
Yes, but…
The figures behind this claim were presented by the conference conveners, the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
”Africa has witnessed a mobile miracle,” according to ITU official Doreen Bogdan.
It sounds impressive, although the unit of ”world region” can obscure the performance of a couple of specific countries. India says it adds two million new cellphone users each month. Grasp this: China connects one million a week!
Leaving aside the comparisons, however, and looking at the continent in its own terms, the ITU figures say that Africa has seen an increase of more than 1 000% in cellphone subscribers between 1998 and 2003.
What makes this growth seem especially significant is its comparison with fixed-line subscribers on the continent. Their numbers are static or even shrinking. The result is that among Africa’s 800-million people today, there are about 52-million cellphone users, versus half that amount for landliners.
Cellphone growth to celebrate, yes. But the hype has got to go:
- Firstly, even with this performance, there are still only a staggering six out of every 100 of the continent’s inhabitants who have access to any telecoms services at all. So the growth is off a miniscule base.
- Secondly, and more worryingly, the rate of cellular connections is beginning to slow. And it is uncertain whether the operator companies are ready to expand the market further because that would require them to lower prices as well as provide expensive coverage to more rural areas.
- Thirdly, the cellphone services — daesirable as they are — remain voice-based. The need for higher-speed, ”broadband” telecoms as required for decent and always-on internet connections isn’t served by the current cellular roll-out.
As the ITU itself in one document acknowledges: ”While broadband has been taking off at a rapid rate in the developed world, the story in Africa has been a different one.”
It continues: ”For a region such as Africa, broadband should not be viewed as a luxury … but as a necessity in an increasingly information-based society. Providing broadband access opens up a new door to a knowledge-based economy, which in turn will promote the region’s social and economic development.”
Seen against this yardstick, we should be wary of being mesmerised by the success of cellphones having started to reduce the gap between basic teledensity in Africa and the rest of the world.
The problem is that a new, and arguably more serious, gap is opening up: the digital divide in broadband access, with Africa being left dangerously behind in this facility.
Another reality check to temper the cellular fervour comes from South African telecoms expert Alison Gillwald. She cautioned the Cairo conference that growth in mobile phones has almost been despite most countries’ policies, not because of them.
She overstates her case a bit, because the rapid roll-out of cellular facilities is indeed related to African governments’ decisions to allot the arena to private businesses, and to usually licence more than one company in order to encourage competition.
Where she is right is that not even the architects of this policy foresaw it working quite as well as it has in bringing telephones to the masses. Most thought that cellphones would be an elitist thing for the business community. The challenge this prompts is that specific, proactive policies are now needed to deal with the current slowdown in cellular growth.
Gillwald also critiqued the way that most African telecoms policies have prioritised the welfare of state-owned telecoms companies. She noted that these policies entailed partly privatising these parastatals and then protecting them from competition in fixed-line telephony.
Her criticism has been that these particular policies have failed to promote the spread of fixed lines. Neither have they attracted as much foreign investment as was hoped — for example, in Kenya and Zambia. Another point is that the protectionist policies have meant that the continent’s incumbent operators have kept their prices too high to be competitive with the advantages of cellphones — making for another reason why they have lost ground.
The consequence of all this is that fixed-line growth has floundered. The significance of this development is not the demise of an archaic technology. Rather, it concerns the growth in internet access on the continent. It takes fixed lines, not cellular systems, to link people to the internet.
This recognition of the importance of fixed lines puts a sobering light on the claim by ITU official Michael Mengis that ”mobile technology is the information society in Africa”.
Once again, there’s a hole in the hype. The point is that it will, sadly, be a long time before fixed-line technologies will be outclassed by mobile. Physical fibre-optic cable remains the necessary backbone infrastructure if a country wants big-bandwidth communications.
This explains why — to avoid network congestion on the South African airwaves — much of our cellular-to-cellular traffic jumps on to Telkom lines at the earliest opportunity, and travels through them as far as possible before jumping off and back into the ether ahead of its final destination.
Installing cables demands enormous investment. But fortunately, there is an alternative: fixed-line telecoms in Africa can increasingly be provided by wireless means. Known enigmatically as ”fixed wireless”, this is a high-speed and directed service via the airwaves.
”Fixed wireless” differs from cellular in that it lacks mobility capability. In other words, just like a landline or an internet computer, you’re tethered when using it. But the point is that at least you’re wired, at a reasonable speed, to the web, e-mail and other services — and you can ratchet yourself up (at a price) to get broadband audiovisual content.
This kind of fixed-line service, as offered by Sentech’s MyWireless, will also likely be deployed by the second national operator (SNO) when it finally becomes operational. Thus, the SNO will use Eskom and Transnet cables for its city-to-city traffic, but from this network to homes or businesses, the vehicle will be fixed wireless signals.
From this point of view, therefore, the focus should be less one-sidedly on cellular telephony issues and more on the challenges of developing fixed-line wireless systems that can bring internet connections, and especially broadband, to Africa. The impending technology of WiMax could play a major role here.
The Sentech system in use right now utilises advanced cellular technologies, known as third generation, but in a fixed wireless mode. It is still a long way away from these kind of network access points being sufficiently widespread and interlinked to allow for fully mobile roaming akin to today’s cellphones.
Another big challenge in regard to promoting fixed wireless networks in Africa, is whether governments will let these systems run voice-telephone links to the main telephone network. In South African terms, permission to do this would enable MyWireless to compete with Telkom and the three cellular companies in providing voice services to its customers. You can see the size of the anti-lobby.
Notwithstanding the ”boosterism” by the ITU around cellular telephony, the organisation does in fact recognise the importance of networks that go beyond voice connections and into the full gamut of information and communication technologies (ICTs). Thus, the organisation unveiled in Cairo a Digital Access Index, which ”measures the overall ability of individuals in a country to access and use new ICTs”.
This index measures much more than voice telecoms — treating the status of these facilities as just one of five areas vital for information society development. The other four areas are: the affordability of internet access; people’s education levels; the size and speed of international bandwidth in a country; and actual internet usage per 100 inhabitants.
Top listed countries on the ITU’s Digital Access Index are the Seychelles and Mauritius; right at the bottom are Niger and Burkina Faso. South Africa leads the medium-ranked countries, followed closely by Botswana and various Maghreb countries. Namibia and Swaziland are also in this category.
Countries such as Zimbabwe, Kenya, Lesotho, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola, Senegal and Ethiopia fall in the lowest of the three brackets.
Except for the Seychelles, no country performs well enough for a figure on the index’s list of numbers of broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants. Seychelles also scores in regard to an ideal goalpost of 10 000 bits per capita in terms of international bandwidth. It comes in at 72 out of 100 inhabitants. Just 12 of every 100 South Africans meet this ideal, while Botswana scores 15 and Gabon 13.
The bottom line is that cellphones are something to celebrate, and their spread is revolutionising communications in Africa. But on their own, they won’t do much to increase the continent’s scores on the Digital Access Index. We need fixed lines for full participation in the global information society.
Guy Berger attended Africa Telecoms 2004 in Cairo as part of the Highway Africa News Agency whose reports are available online: Highway Africa.
Guy Berger is head of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University and deputy chair of the South African National Editors Forum (Sanef). He was recently nominated for the World Technology Awards.