Developing countries are behind the rest of the world with regards to the adoption of Internet services and the evolution into the digital economy.
This is according to Eckart Zollner, head of business development at Jasco, who notes the exceptionally high disparity in the retail price for the same Internet access within these two different ecosystems has a large role to play.
Zollner described three elements that will contribute towards reducing the price of broadband communication in Africa.
The first element is a liberalised, deregulated market with effective regulation over the critical elements of frequency spectrum, infrastructure sharing and legal compliance, he said.
"The problem we have in Africa is many markets are not properly regulated and are dominated by state-owned monopolies.
"Companies are not able to compete and accelerate but often get delays to the delivery of new services."
Therefore, this market tends to get left behind and in terms of labour, latest technology and delivery of effective competition to drive prices down, he added.
The second element is the network: that is, architecture built by the providers. This network architecture should include connections to national, regional and international Internet exchange points, said Zollner. Internet service providers in Africa have to look at infrastructure sharing, he added.
The third element is the network quality and network resilience against failures and outages, noted Zollner.
In order to get subscriber trust and maximum utilisation, the network must be able to withstand equipment failures, route failures and must be designed to monitor and manage customer traffic use, he said.
"A leading network will own or have access to excellent infrastructure on all three layers of the network core, the transmission backbone and the last mile access technology.
"It will operate successfully in a well-developed ecosystem of effective market liberalisation, regulation and in an environment of successful partner collaboration such as content networks and numerous services networks."
Such a network will have multiple routing options nationally, regionally and internationally, says Zollner.
He believes Internet service providers (ISPs) need to be creative and innovative with regards to the monetisation of service that may come from indirect revenue streams such as advertising or third party service provisioning.
Also, they must understand their market segments and offer the relevant services at the correct and affordable price points, said Zollner.
The ISPs must ensure the correct barrier to entry criteria is set and that new and relevant services for each market segment are added continuously.
Share