The South African mobile voice business is saturated, and high-speed broadband is going to be one of the major drivers of the sector's transformation to convergence.
This is according to Vodacom's executive head of managed services, Gary Hart. “Vodacom realised three years ago that the mobile and voice business was ultimately saturated and needed to look at new opportunities to extend revenue.”
Hart gave examples of the changes in the local telecommunications space: “The South African market is becoming saturated from a voice point of view, so many telcos are now looking at new markets, and to expand into Africa.”
Bundled goods
However, Hart cautioned that Africa is fraught with licensing and infrastructure challenges and despite having an appetite for African expansion, telecoms companies will need to consider these factors or face getting burned.
Hart believes voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) will become the primary line for true unified communications in the future. “VOIP is a disruptive technology for mobile operators and they need to find ways in which to work with VOIP because it will affect their revenue streams.”
He said mobile broadband has overtaken fixed-line broadband in SA. He pointed out that following the deployment of the undersea Seacom cables, the country will start to see massive take-up in technologies such as cloud computing, software-as-a-service and IPTV.
“In 2011, fixed-mobile convergence will reshape the ICT landscape,” noted Hart. “To have a common voice, mail, systems, presence detection, core backbone that allows seamless handover from one technology to another. We believe this is where the future lies.
“Virtual working and video conferencing is going to revolutionise the way we work. It's going to increase productivity and reduce carbon footprints. A lot of the traditional IP players are looking to bundling all of the services together such as voice, data, video and content to the consumer.”
New-age adaptation
Hart said: “Going forward, the market is going to be dominated by three new-age telcos and Vodacom is going to be one of them. There are more than 400 value-added network service providers out there, and they will have to re-adapt their business models and we foresee that many of them will be taken up by larger telcos or more partnerships formed.”
According to Hart, the global market is growing exponentially. “The interesting thing is that DSL takes up 65% of the international market, accounting for the majority of the broadband market. This is different to the South African market, where 54% is through mobile technologies and 39% through DSL technologies.
“We as an industry need to move to a space where we can provide the best quality services in broadband at a lower cost.”
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