Tony Dolton, CEO of Unitel in Angola, believes that more highly accessible broadband capacity at higher speeds will allow more innovation and greater opportunity for Africa. Dolton who will be joining a keynote panel discussion on the second day of AfricaCom will speak on how LTE is changing the digital landscape in Africa.
He noted that this year, there has not been so much game changing but the continued evolution of Big data.
He said: “With higher speeds and bandwidth and more reliable services, the Mobile Telecoms operators in Africa have the opportunity to reach into the more traditional fixed line services in the Enterprise area and to develop new revenue streams such as VPN’s or Closed User Groups, as well as M2M, ICT and traditional data services. To offer affordable Enterprise services in areas of low fixed coverage should be the objective of all Mobile operators.
“In the consumer segment, the Mobile operators still have some way to go to get customers using data and this can be achieved by providing the right pricing, affordable but good quality devices and the content that will drive usage. However to grow this area we must also provide the support to help educate potential customers of the value that data services can bring to their personal and business lives. We strongly believe that there is much that can be learnt from the OTT suppliers in providing content as a service rather than content in terms of Mega Bytes or Giga Bytes.”
He said the big impact of the digital transition on the telecoms and media sector is the convergence of content and delivery and the need to be “connected always” which implies significant additional investments into the network infrastructure.
“To make this affordable from a cost perspective the Mobile operators need to focus on greater efficiency and better delivery services,” he said.
