A look back. My review of African telecom infrastructure development in 2014. Undersea Cables Perhaps the most noticeable thing about undersea fibre-optic cable development around Africa was the soundless popping of project bubbles that failed…
The release last week of ResearchICTAfrica (RIA)’s report on mobile phone pricing in Africa has provoked a little controversy in South Africa. The facts are quite damning. South Africa has some of the highest mobile costs on the continent. This is odd given South Africa’s comparative wealth and infrastructural advantages. By rights South Africa ought to have the cheapest phone calls and the fastest bandwidth on the continent. We don’t. Why would that be? Well in South Africa we are very good at finger pointing. Industry points to government and the regulator. The regulator points to industry and government. And the government points at the regulator and industry. And so this merry-go-round has gone on since the turn of the century.
I’ve just finished reading Jenny Aker and Isaac Mbiti’s Mobile Phones and Economic Development in Africa. This is an excellent paper and well worth the read. The authors have done a great job in tempering…
The South American research network, DIRSI, have just published a report entitled “Tariffs and affordability gap of mobile telephony services in Latin America and the Caribbean” which profiles mobile affordability in Latin America and the…
Here is a first stab at putting together an index that relates the cost of mobile services to income at the bottom of the pyramid in Africa. I found some ILO data on minimum wage…