Mobile phones boom in Tanzania
By Simon Hancock
BBC Click Online
In the third of Click Online's reports in this month's Africa
season, we visits Tanzania where mobile phones are taking the
country by storm, although only one in 10 houses has electricity.
An alien landing in Tanzania could be forgiven for thinking that
the only business here was the mobile phone. Over the last few
years they have completely taken over the landscape. Some 97% of
Tanzanians say they can access a mobile phone, and what is just as
interesting, as in many African countries, is how those phones are
being used.
Take the island of Zanzibar for example. Here, fishing is one of
the mainstays of the economy, supplying restaurants and hotels with
fish for the many tourists who visit the island. Many fishermen now
carry mobile phones while they are at sea, and they use them to
check market prices. If there are too many fish in Zanzibar, they
sail to Dar es Salaam to get better prices to make more money.
Phones also serve another even more vital use, allowing fishermen
in trouble to call for assistance.
Landline debate
As well as the novel uses you find for the phones, it is the sheer
extent of coverage that you notice here. You can get a signal in
places so remote you would not even think to turn your mobile on if
you were in the US or Europe, such as the smallest villages or even
on the slopes of Kilimanjaro.
It is fair to say that the mobile networks are so dominant that the
country will probably never develop or need a fixed-line
infrastructure. But recently a debate has been raging as to whether
this kind of leap-frogging may have any downside. It was always
assumed that here lurks the spectre of the digital divide. Since
the first internet evangelists emerged from the mist, it has become
gospel that for economies to grow and business to flourish, the
internet was essential. After all, it was in the West. So, without
landlines, the communications industry would stall, internet take
up would be hampered and all kinds of economic horrors would be
unleashed. However, no-one told the Tanzanians about these dire
predictions, so they just got on with things.
Economy boost
Call centres have sprung up all over Tanzania. Most people do not
actually own phones, so this is how many people communicate. It is
a good business, and once again these phones are connected via GSM
rather than landlines.
Others have developed even simpler businesses based around mobiles,
such as reselling their air time to others, or make a living
sending and receiving text messages. Mobile phones seem to have
created a new sector of the economy, and some now wonder if the
emphasis on the internet when looking at the digital divide was
wrong-headed.
Len Waverman, an economics professor at London Business School,
says: "Even in the more developed parts of Africa, where we thought
the phone would just be a toy of the urban rich, it's not. "It
really is a tool for business development, and it's moving across
population segments that we really did not before believe would be
accessible by these companies." Research has shown that increased
mobile accessibility in Africa is boosting countries' economies in
the same way that fixed-line installation in the west did in back
in the 1970s.
Len Waverman (London Business School ) says: "The digital divide
that we thought was really very big between Africa and the rest of
us in the Western world is really diminishing, and it's the mobile
phones doing it, not the PC."
Inspiring the West
Back in Zanzibar, the latest product by the island's cell phone
operator, Zantel, looked traditional, but its fixed-style phone for
homes will not connect by either copper wire or even fibre optics.
Mohammed Salim, the CEO of Zantel, explains: "Our strategy is not
to go on fibre-optics or copper wires, because that is too
expensive. "We are thinking about going through the CDMA, which is
a wireless system. That is a very useful and effective way of
running out to the rural areas, and to the cities, and much faster
than through copper."
Zantel has recently been granted a licence to extend outside
Zanzibar and to operate nationwide. To extend their network across
the country will cost just half a billion dollars. Even before
their expansion, their subscriber base is growing 25% year on year.
Mobile use in Tanzania and across Africa is gaining momentum all
the time, and users continue to confound researchers with their
creativity in using the devices. Already the West has started to
look to Africa and the developing world for new ideas as to where
to take the technology next.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/programmes/click_online/
4706437.stm
Published: 2005/07/22 15:20:03 GMT
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