WORLDWIDE MARKET RESEARCH REPORT - CISE

EC/IST FP6 Project No 026920
Work Package: 6
Type of document: Report
Date: 20.12.2007
File name: OP_WP6_D37_V1.0.doc Version: 1.0
Title: Worldwide Market Research Report 191 / 356
own possibilities, projects for the connection with other african countries and with the rest of
the world.
Nevertheless, on a world-wide level, Africa is still to the last position as it regards the
development of the telecommunications infrastructure. The average teledensity is barely on
2% and almost all telephones are situated in the urban centres.
In many countries, the requests of activation of a telephone line overcome the 700,000 units
and the expectation time is also of 10 years (like in the Algeria). Also the public telephones
are not so much. In requital, the mobile telephony is very developed and it succeed to cover
almost all the territory. In the last decade there have been a lot of privatizations and new
telephone operators have risen, that should increase the competition, advantaging the end
users. Nevertheless the most greater obstacle to the communication are, currently, the high
tariffs, so much that it is exploded newly, the phenomenon of the "miskin", term used in
Ethiopia to refer to the small beeps exchanged among the mobile telephone, at the purpose
to exchange a conventional information, without the need to effectuate a real call.
[A01] It is a tactic born out of ingenuity and necessity, say analysts who have tracked an
explosion in miskin calls by cash-strapped cell-phone users from Cape Town to Cairo.
The beeping boom is being driven by a sharp rise in mobile phone use across the continent.
Africa had an estimated 192.5 million mobile phone users in 2006, up from just 25.3 million
in 2001, according to the U.N.'s International Telecommunication Union. Customers may
have enough money for the one-off purchase of a handset, but very little ready cash to
spend on phone cards for the prepaid accounts that dominate the market.
Africa's mobile phone companies say the practice has become so widespread they have had
to step in to prevent their circuits being swamped by second-long calls.
"We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day," said Faisal Ijaz Khan,
chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly
MTC). "And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of
missed calls in Africa."
Also the internet connectivity has sustained, in the last 10 years, a notable growth: at the
end of 1999, only Congo and Somalia didn't have still a local internet access. The most