According to Total Telecom, there are now more mobile phone users in Africa than in North America. Apparently, the number of mobile phone users in Africa exceeded 280 million in Q1 2008 and will reach the 300 million mark next month. As a result, the continent has surpassed North America (U.S. and Canada) which has a total of 277 million users. To be fair there are much more people living in Africa than in North America, and needless to say ARPU is much higher in the States and Canada. However, I’m pleased to write about any good developments coming out from Africa. Hopefully, we’ll have more mobile-related news to report about the content soon.WiFi usage growing rapidly in US and UK
AdMob is out with their November 2008 Mobile Metrics Report. From there we find out iPhone requests grew again, this time for 52% month to month, reaching a total of 359 million. This in turn gave iPhone 6.3% of total requests or 9.9% of U.S.-based requests. with 42% of all requests coming in over WiFi instead of a mobile operator network, the iPhone has by far the most WiFi usage. WiFi only devices such as the iPod Touch and Sony PlayStation Portable also generated significant traffic, and the similar is expected to happen with WiFi-enabled devices like the T-Mobile (NYSE: DT) G1 and BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) Bold.
Broadband satellite internet West Africa.
High power Ku beam from Newskies satellite NSS-7 at orbit 338.5E. Two way dedicated business satellite internet with direct access connection to the USA.
- Includes option: VoIP telephone service.
- Downlink: up to 60 Mbit/s download speed. Uplink: up to 4 Mbit/s.
- Entry level is just 96kbit/s download and 32kbit/s uplink.
