Africa and the Middle East 2011 (12)

Theme: When mobile goes broadband

Mobile broadband is more than a question of bandwidth and speed. With mobile broadband we will all be able to communicate, access, share, research, develop and create information take part in social activities benefit, whenever convenient, from a host of vital services anywhere mobile networks reach world, from any terminal device. The availability of true mobile broadband is still limited in many regions, but it will grow strongly throughout the region in the years to come. Networks infrastructure deployment, affordable terminal devices, relevant local language applications and a concerted push by local service providers will all be needed - and are all coming faster than most of us expected.

It will be challenging to expand and finance network broadband capacity, especially since experience shows revenue tends to grow more slowly than traffic and that building and deploying new local content services to meet the competition generally involves a difficult learning curve.