Why Africa Leads The Traffic To BBC News' WAP Site

by David Ajao
2006-08-21 08:00:00 | Viewed 7295 times

Global news leader - the BBC, last week announced that traffic to its WAP site from Africa, and especially Nigeria, is the highest.

The opening paragraphs read:

Africa, in particular Nigeria, is dominating international mobile phone access to the BBC's website.

According to July's statistics, 61% of the BBC's international Wap users came from Nigeria and 19% from South Africa.

"Wap is the one platform where African countries continue to appear in the top five in our statistics," said BBC developer Gareth Owen.

This is not unsurprising at all but also comes as an eye-opener into the potential of the mobile internet in Africa.

Poor fixed-line networks

Africa currently has the fastest up-take of mobile telephony in the world, and indeed, Nigeria is one of the world fastest growing market for mobile telecommunications. And why not? Poor and unreliable fixed-line networks by the incumbent (and in many cases state-owned monopoly) telecom operators have left Africa behind in the world of telecommunications for far too long.

With the liberalization of telecommunication in many African countries that was ushered-in as a result of more countries embracing democracy, digital cellular network licences were issued to private telecom operators and the markets that were hitherto dominated by state-owned telecom operators were now driven by stiff competition as each cellco struggled to out-play the other.

Entry of the big players

Africa had hitherto been seen as a high-risk zone for telecom investment. Potential investors often point to poor existing infrastructure, unstable power supply, high import tariffs, poor security etc as reasons why they should shy away from sub-Sahara Africa. However, the phenomenal uptake of cellular communications in Nigeria especially, have given such people a serious re-think and they have since struggled to enter the Nigerian market, for example. Celtel has been successful with buying a majority stake in Vmobile Nigeria, but Vodacom (a business partnership between world-market leader Vodafone and South Africa's state-owned Telkom) never made it into Nigeria despite several efforts.

Network upgrade to support data traffic

Having rolled-out their voice networks using digital technology (GSM or CDMA), the next line of action was for the cellcos to carry data over their network. Such data would allow access to the Internet, or to a virtual private network. As a result, many cellcos who were utilizing GSM upgraded their networks to support GPRS, EDGE, UMTS (popularly called 3G) or even HSDPA. All four technologies offer varying degree of speed and reliability with the fastest and most recent being HSDPA.

Handset manufacturers

Leading handsets manufacturers tugged it out amongst themselves to offer the best handsets at the cheapest prices. New handsets came with GPRS as a norm, whilst more trendy ones come with EDGE, UMTS (3G) and recently HSDPA. The exceptions are low-cost handsets, targeted at the developing world - these handsets are stripped of any bells-and-whistles, so the manufacturers could recover cost.

High cost of computers

High import tariffs amongst other factors, have made the cost of acquiring new computers high in Africa. Thus many people have turned to mobile phones, for running their lives. Calendars, Personal Digital Assistant programs, Reminders, Basic calculators, Address books etc. are all normal functionalities being found on today's handsets. The more sophisticated ones come with Word processing, Spreadsheets, full HTML (Web) browsers, Email, Push-to-talk, Music/Video player etc.

With all these factors coming into play, it is only natural that traffic from Africa is one of the highest in the WAP world.

The author, Oluniyi David Ajao is a Web Developer with Web4Africa and writes from Accra, Ghana.

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