With the increase in saturation of mobile services in urban markets across the world, mobile operators have shifted their focus to towards the relatively untapped rural markets for better business opportunities and a chance at increasing revenues.

According to reports, industry analysts predict Nigeria the largest mobile market in the continent, to be home to over 90 million subscribers by this year end. Further, improvements in broadband connectivity along with the emergence of new generation smartphones are expected to drive mobile data growth in the economy.

In most rural economies, the lack of adequate infrastructure has been a grave cause of concern for mobile operators as it reduces their profits and drives up costs for customers. Currently, industry reports suggest that a fully functioning network grid could help operators cut their mobile tariffs by 50 percent, which is higher than those being offered in developed countries.

Changes have been observed in the investment environment as well. With operators offering discounted services to low income users in order to expand their reach, the ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) has witnessed a decline. Bharti Airtel, which had acquired Africa’s Zain, slashed its prices by significant amounts in a bid to increase its market share, which increased the pressure across the industry. Further, sources reveal that Etisalat (Saudi Arabia) and Globacom have also been increasingly gaining customers, giving strong competition to market leader MTN.

The next big thing in the economy is being considered to be mobile banking services. With a large portion of the population being unbanked but gaining access to mobile devices, more and more consumers are using their phone to transfer money and pay for goods, in a more convenient and secure manner.

Source: Wireless Federation

National regulator the Tanzania Communication Regulatory Authority (TCRA) is promising to improve telecoms access in rural areas under the Ministry of Science and Technology’s ‘Equal Opportunity Trust Fund’, The Citizen daily quotes its deputy coastal zone manager Jumanne Ikuja as saying.

According to the TCRA official, the agency is exploring all angles to ensure that areas currently without access to services can receive them. ‘The authority continues to receive information and complaints from different areas regarding poor communication services … we are making analysis that will give us the way forward on all these problems,’ said Mr Ikuja. With companies tending to avoid big investment in areas of low or no chance of profitability, the TCRA is providing its equal opportunity trust fund to subsidise the cost of enabling such remote areas.

Source: TeleGeography

Mexican fixed line incumbent Telefonos de Mexico (Telmex) has unveiled plans to break its fixed line voice operations apart, revealing it aims to form two separate companies, one of which will exclusively serve rural areas, the Wall Street Journal reports. Under the telco’s proposals, which will require the approval of the Secretario de Comunicaciones y Transportes (SCT) and other regulatory bodies, Telmex intends to create a new company, Telmex Social, to service rural regions and those areas of the country ‘in which there is no economic interest of any competitor’. The new company, Telmex said, would continue to pay the same interconnection rates to competitors as the enlarged operator currently does.

The move, it is thought, is in part aimed at countering criticism of Telmex’s dominant position in the fixed line voice sector; it currently has a market share of around 80%.

Further, it is also believed that Telmex, which is controlled by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, hopes that the decision to split its operations will prompt the relevant regulatory bodies to allow it to offer IPTV services and triple-play bundles, which would allow it to compete directly with the country’s main cable TV operator Televisa, which already offers such packages.

Source: TeleGeography

The Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA) has announced plans to cut the interconnection tariff of international call termination. The watchdog hopes the measure will reduce the use of illegal VoIP services. Four telcos currently own VoIP concessions: Nepal Telecom (NT), United Telecom (UTL), Spice Nepal (Ncell) and STM Telecom, although only NT has started offering a VoIP service for incoming calls. The regulator recently stated that more companies would be awarded VoIP licences provided they expand their service area to 25 districts covering 1,300 village district committees (VDCs).

Source: TeleGeography

Iraqi mobile operator Asiacell Communications, a consortium comprising Asiacell Iraq (30%), Qatar Telecom (Qtel, 30%) and investment group Merchant Bridge (40%), has signed network expansion agreements with Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) and Ericsson, as it looks to expand its service footprint in the country. According to the cellco’s chief technical and IT officer, Patson Anius, the supply contracts will allow the operator to introduce ‘advanced services’ tailored to the domestic market. ‘Next year, we will be further expanding our network coverage to include small villages and residential communities in remote areas. We look forward to breaking our own GSM deployment record in Iraq next year,’ he said.

TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database writes that Asiacell is one of three cellcos licensed to provide national mobile services, having been awarded its concession in August 2007 at a cost of USD1.25 billion. In 2009 it deployed 1,490 base transceiver stations (BTSs) on its network, thanks to the build-out of 950 new communication towers, and improved the service capabilities of 450 other cell sites. At the end of September 2010 Asiacell had 7.917 million mobile subscribers, placing it second in the market with a share of 34.8%. It competes with Zain Iraq, Korek Telecom and SanaTel.

Source: TeleGeography

The Chilean government, former fixed line incumbent Entel and Swedish equipment vendor Ericsson have announced a plan to provide three million people in remote rural Chile with mobile broadband and mobile telephony by the end of 2011. The first stage of the project - Rural Internet Network: All Chile Communicated - was completed in September this year, by which time 1.7 million people had been connected. In 2009 Entel and Ericsson won a USD45 million public contract from the government to provide broadband access to between 70% and 90% of the rural population. The two-year end-to-end project includes deployment of core and radio access networks for both 2G and 3G platforms. Ericsson is building, integrating and activating 2G and 3G base stations at about 1,500 rural locations.

Nicolas Brancoli, President of Ericsson Chile, said: ‘This project marks a new milestone in public-private partnerships in Latin America because we're collaborating in the financing and the development of this connectivity plan. Research shows that a 10% increase in mobile penetration in developing countries leads to a 1.2% increase in gross domestic product. We hope this project will reduce the digital divide and help increase social and economic empowerment in Chile's developing regions.’

Source: TeleGeography

­The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co. (PLDT) says that it plans to spend P1.5 billion (US$34 million) to roll out more additional cell sites in rural areas across the country. The company expects to deploy an additional 500 base station "to complete the gap in remote areas", Napoleon Nazareno, PLDT's president and chief executive told reporters.

The rural expansion is part of the P28.6 billion (US$657 million) capex for this year, and the rural expansion is expected to be completed within three months.

The company currently has some 9,000 base stations, of which 114 are running on renewable energy supplies. This figure is expected to rise as the rural base stations will be in areas with unreliable power supplies.

According to the Mobile World analysts, the company's mobile division - which trades as Smart - ended June with just under 43.4 million customers, representing a market share of 55%.

Source: Cellular News

Belize Telemedia Ltd (BTL) has launched a new fixed-wireless telephony and high speed internet service for rural customers based on 3G CDMA2000 1xEV-DO technology in the 450MHz frequency band. Users, some in areas previously without access to a full range of services, can now sign up for ‘HomeFone’ or ‘BizFone’ CDMA fixed line phone services (including SMS) and broadband-speed internet access. The network is being rolled out in phases commencing with villages in the southern part of the country. BTL says thousands of additional users will benefit from the new service.

The telco also announced it had completed upgrades to its fibre-optic transmission network in the south, increasing capacity in the Punta Gorda and Independence areas, whilst giving continuous capacity from Belize City to Punta Gorda both via Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) and Under Hung Fibre Cables. Telemedia’s existing fibre-optic network extends from Belize City to the northern and western borders and also into Belmopan.

Source: TeleGeography

The government of Venezuela plans to invest USD11.6 million to open 200 new public internet centres across the country during 2010, reports BNamericas. The government says it currently has 668 internet centres, used by approximately three million people and expects there to be at least five million users by the end of the year. The state also announced it has installed 2,000 satellite aerials for internet use in remote areas of the country to date, using Venezuela’s own satellite, Venesat-1. The project stipulates a total deployment of 16,000 satellite aerials.

Source: TeleGeography

Chinese news agency Xinhua reports that at the end of 2009 voice telephony services were available to 99.86% of the country’s administrative villages (up from 98% a year earlier), while internet access covered 91.5% (up from 89%), according to data from the regulator MIIT. Between them, China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom raised RMB10.3 billion (USD1.5 billion) to help deploy telephone and internet networks in mountainous regions and plateau areas last year.

Meanwhile, China Mobile is reported to have finished 2009 with more than five million 3G subscribers. According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database the cellco launched its 3G TD-SCDMA network in April 2008.

Source: TeleGeography

Paraguay's National Telecommunications Commission (Conatel) has granted mobile operator Tigo the license for universal service provision, local newspaper ABC reports. Tigo will receive subsidies of PYG 5 billion from the Universal Service Fund to deploy mobile telephony lines in areas currently not covered by the network of Paraguay's state-owned operator incumbent Copaco. Over the next six months, Tigo will have to deploy mobile phone lines in the department of San Pedro. The overall subsidies for this area reach PYG 1.15 billion. Additionally, subsidies for the department of Concepcion exceed PYG 2.28 billion, while the Amambay region has been assigned PYG 1.12 billion and the Canindeyu area will receive up to PYG 377 million in universal service subsidies.

Source: TelecomPaper

The Estonian government has approved plans to construct a nationwide superfast broadband network, according to local news source Postimees Online. Under the proposals the state expects 90% of the country to have access to the 100Mbps network by 2012, with the remainder of the population to be connected by 2015. Juhan Parts, Estonia’s minister of economic affairs and communications, also revealed that the government would create an autonomous foundation comprising all major telecommunication providers in the country to oversee the network’s development. ‘The state plans to provide significant support for developing the infrastructure; as of now, the state’s contribution that is required is approximately EEK1 billion (USD91.45 million)’, the minister noted. It is expected that the government will fund the deployment of infrastructure in those areas, mostly rural and sparsely populated, that are not considered financially feasible by commercial operators.

Source: Telegeography

­Fueled by mobile penetration into the rural market and by uptake of 3G services, China's telecommunications market will generate $187 billion by 2014, surpassing Japan to become the largest telecommunications services market in Asia, according to a new report from Pyramid Research.

China's telecommunications market generated US$110 billion in 2008, making it the second largest telecommunications services market in Asia/Pacific after Japan, notes Daniel Yu, analyst at Pyramid Research and author of the report. "Given continued demand for connectivity and rising adoption of mobile and fixed broadband services, the Chinese market will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 8.8 percent between 2009 and 2014, reaching $187 billion by 2014, surpassing Japan as the largest telecommunications services market in Asia," Yu says.

Source: Cellular News

India’s Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has invited bids from both private and state-owned operators to roll out around 28,000 fixed line broadband exchanges and 6,000 satellite broadband sites as part of efforts to increase broadband penetration across the country, particularly in rural regions. According to the Economic Times the project will be funded from the Universal Service Obligation Fund (USOF), which at present is understood to have around INR200 billion (USD4.1 billion) in unutilised funds. The successful bidders will be required to share their infrastructure with other operators, and the subsidy granted by the USOF will be allocated in a phased manner, with the final value determined by the degree to which infrastructure is shared.

Source: Telegeography

The World Bank has agreed to give Tanzania USD100 million to improve telecoms infrastructure in governmental buildings, improve access in rural parts of the country and boost registration systems, Reuters reports citing bank officials as saying. The funding forms part of a total of USD151 million approved to boost telecoms access in Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique. Although Tanzania was home to a total of 14 million mobile and fixed line users at the end of March this year, up from 13.1 million at 31 December 2008, access to the internet, especially in rural areas, is patchy at best.

Lord Stephen Carter, the UK’s communication minister, has released the final version of his Digital Britain report, which details proposals for improving and expanding the nation’s digital infrastructure. Echoing the previous indications in the interim report, which was published in January 2009, one of the main proposals is for the universal provision of broadband services at speeds of 2Mbps, which is expected to be delivered through a combination of fixed and mobile technologies. Approximately 15% of British homes are not currently able to receive 2Mbps services, and the government will release approximately GBP200 million (USD328 million) from unused funds previously set aside to assist elderly people with the switch from analogue to digital TV. To manage the process a Network Design and Procurement Group will be created, and will be responsible for structuring and running the procurement process, overseeing delivery, ensuring active stakeholder engagement, and accountability for the value for money use of the direct public contribution to the Universal Service Commitment.

Source: TeleGeography.

The Brazilian telecoms regulator Anatel intends to hold a licensing tender for voice telephony and broadband internet services in rural parts of the country, Agencia Estado reports citing the communications minister Helio Costa. The tender could take place later this year and will favour telcos that pledge to deliver broadband internet services for rural areas by offering them lower licence fees, the minister said. Costa said the government has set itself a target of providing 100% telephony coverage in rural areas by 2014, adding that it would use the 450MHz frequency for phone services in such areas.

Source: TeleGeography.