Tanzania is Vodacom’s second biggest market after SA, but the company’s Tanzania CEO, Rene Meza, says that although mobile penetration in urban areas is more than 80%, in rural areas it’s only 25%. He says this means the company must look to rural areas for growth and operators must ensure there is infrastructure there to
Consumers and operators will be inconvenienced at the end of September if a planned switch-off of counterfeit handsets takes place. Consumers will lose connectivity, while operators are set to lose revenue. An estimated 2,4m mobile phone users in Kenya use counterfeit devices. Kenya’s Communications
Kenya’s government has secured a 6bn shilling (R580m) loan from China to connect 36 Kenyan districts using fibre-optic cable. The project is intended to provide the East African nation’s government with the ability to communicate and transact digitally, even from remote areas. The project forms part of a
Kenya looks set to crack down on copper-cable thieves, with parliament introducing amended legislation that will see perpetrators facing fines of Sh5m (R500 000) or 10 years in jail. Under current Kenyan law, the destruction of electricity and power cables is punishable by a fine of Sh100 000 (R10 000), a
Following lobbying from broadcasters, consumer bodies and Kenya’s communication commission, the East African nation has scrapped import duties on set-top boxes (STBs), the decoders that allow analogue television sets to receive digital broadcasts. The
Broadband can reduce carbon emissions by millions of metric tons and delivery significant energy saving, a new report from the Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) shows. The report, which is backed by BT Group, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson and Verizon, shows a direct link between broadband
Ethiopia’s state-owned Internet service provider, the Ethiopian Telecommunication Corporation (Ethio-Telcom), has begun performing deep-packet inspection of all Internet traffic in the country. The country’s government recently ushered in new legislation that criminalises the use of services such as Skype
Struggling Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia will slash an additional 10 000 jobs, on top of 14 000 job losses in 2011, as it struggles to make headway against Samsung and Apple in the smartphone market. The company, headed by Canadian national Stephen Elop, says it aims
Two of the UK’s biggest mobile operators, Vodafone and O2 (owned by Spain’s Telefonica), have announced they will pool infrastructure in a bid to reduce costs and build a platform for next-generation long-term evolution (LTE) networks in a move that could point the way for SA operators to build their own
Mobile operator Smile Telecoms has launched a long-term evolution (LTE) network in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, beating SA to the punch to roll out the next-generation mobile technology on a commercial basis. LTE, sometimes referred to as 4G, offers
