This post originally appeared November 23rd in
Telesperience, the community for telecoms software (BSS and OSS) and data professionals.

Attending
Africa.Com in Cape Town last week with Mobixell CTO, Yehuda Elmaliach, we reconfirmed what everyone in the telecom industry should know. There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the future of mobile broadband Web acceleration and video optimization in Africa. In fact, we believe that mobile video will play a key role in the growth of mobile broadband in Africa.
The first thing that sets Africa apart from Western markets though is that most people accessing the Internet in Africa are doing so for the first time via their mobile handsets. There are a number of reasons for this. Mostly, it’s because the fixed line broadband was, and in some cases still is, very poor if non-existent. The relatively high cost of PCs, laptops, cable and infrastructure theft, combined with the cost of connecting homes and businesses to a wired network, are all factors that contribute to make wired communication extremely challenging.
Whilst smartphone or tablet ownership in Africa is still in its infancy, the introduction of lower cost smart devices means that mobile broadband services and content delivery are becoming affordable to a wider number of people and services are starting to take off. For example, in South Africa, where the mobile network is somewhat more advanced than most African countries, mobile broadband penetration is still only around 15%. On the other hand, in the rest of Africa, fewer than 4% of people currently have a mobile broadband-capable device. However, once people “get it” they realize that Internet access can greatly improve their lives. Think of the marketplace: for centuries the farmer took his goods to the market to be sold, as did his father, grandfather etc. Now they can sell their products to a wider audience and have faster access to the items they require, all because of their mobile broadband connection.
This means that Africa is a potentially enormous mobile broadband market and statistics are starting to reflect this.
While African operators want to offer their customers greater access to data services, with Internet access comes Internet content. It was only in the last couple of years that the first African mobile device streamed video, but just like in more developed markets, video is fast becoming the dominant bandwidth hog. As an example, video is now approaching 30% of mobile HTTP traffic in South Africa and up to 20% in the rest of Africa. As mentioned above, the relative penetration of mobile broadband devices is much lower in Africa than in Europe, and if the anticipated adoption continues at its current pace it will not be long before networks simply won’t be able to support the additional volume. (See
Killer App or Network Killer?.)
That’s why mobile operators across Africa are already thinking about how they can ‘squeeze the pipes’ and get as much data through their networks as possible. The first phase of solutions is Web acceleration, which Mobixell has already deployed in Africa. By compressing Webpage text, scripts and images, African MNOs have started down the path toward optimization and more efficient data networks.
At Africa.Com, there was a lot of interest among MNOs, both large and small, in video caching and optimization. As video traffic expands on networks with limited bandwidth, video optimization offers big savings for an operator in place of buying additional infrastructure and wholesale bandwidth.
African ARPUs are low compared to Europe and North America. Thus the challenge operators face in Africa is providing good QoS whilst still being profitable. But since mobile is the first line of communication across Africa, MNOs know that they need to continue investing in their networks to retain their customers and contribute to the socioeconomic development of their countries and the continent.
For all these reasons, we believe that data optimization has an important role to play in African broadband provision – helping support sustainable, and profitable, growth in the future.
Stephen Ebbutt
Sales Director for Southern Africa
Mobixell