Africa mobile firms to invest $50 bln over 5 years

Africa mobile firms to invest $50 bln over 5 years

Sub-Saharan Africa's GSM mobile industry plans to invest $50 billion over five years to expand networks and upgrade services, an industry official said on Monday. "That puts Africa probably at the very front of the investment league in mobile," Tom Phillips, the chief government and regulatory affairs officer for industry body GSM Association (GSMA) told Reuters in an interview."The investment will bring sub-Saharan Africa broadly in line with the developed world in terms of mobile coverage ... it will be truly connected to the mobile broadband global network."

The continent's service providers have spent about $5 billion a year since 2000, he said. Researchers estimate that mobile operators worldwide have spent more than $234 billion building GSM and 3GSM networks over the last five years.Nearly 70 percent of sub-Saharan Africans are covered by mobile networks today, but that number would rise to about 90 percent following the new investment, Phillips said. Much of the planned new money will go not only on expanding coverage for voice calls, but also on boosting the capability of networks to deliver high-speed internet access. Only 26 percent of Africans currently use mobile services, spending $13.60 on average each month, mostly on text and voice calls, according to GSMA figures.

MORE SPECTRUM, MORE CONNECTIONS

Phillips was speaking ahead of a meeting of African government leaders and telecoms industry officials in Rwanda that hopes to come up with major new commitments to connect the unconnected on the continent. African governments needed to remove obstacles like charges for accessing telecoms spectrum to reduce connection costs to fixed-line operators -- usually state-owned monopolies -- to further mobile expansion, he said. "Charges made by government to access spectrum just take money out of the investment part rather than support it."

Phillips said if mobile operators were to connect as many people as possible in the future, they would need more spectrum, adding that some radio frequencies currently used for analogue television should be handed over for cell phone use. African operators currently get spectrum bands at between 900 and 1800 megahertz, but are asking for bands at about 110 megahertz, he said. East African governments also needed to stop squabbling over plans for an undersea telecoms cable linking the region with the rest of the world, he added. Countries on Africa's east coast currently have no cable links and rely on expensive satellite connections that drive up bandwidth connection costs. The GSMA also urged governments to cut taxes, which it said would in turn increase usage and taxes collected. "A lot of governments continue to tax mobile services almost as if they were luxury items," Phillips said. "With high levels of tax, it is difficult for operators to invest as much as they would have done."