Weekly News

Mobile operators are notoriously reluctant to release useful coverage information. Individual operator coverage maps are generally useless. Airtel Zambia is a classic example – as you zoom in the map abandons any hope of showing coverage and just highlights specific spots where there is (may be?) coverage: Most coverage maps exaggerate coverage dramatically. The GSMA’s Mobile Coverage Maps use a really large radius for 4G of over 20km’s. In interviews with operators, the consensus for rural areas is around 8km, depending on factors such as terrain and population density.  Accuracy is important for two reasons:  Broadband connectivity has massive benefits […]

The GSMA has just released its Mobile Gender Gap Report 2022. In the report, it finds that the gender gap is quite large. In Kenya, the gap is 38%, in Nigeria it is 36% and in Senegal it is 16%. The report defines the gender gap as: One of the key findings is that “women are now 16 per cent less likely than men to use mobile internet, which translates into 264 million fewer women than men”. It sounds really dramatic and 264 million women not using the Internet seems like an enormous amount!  One of the recommendations of the […]

This week’s newsletter provides a quick update on the OECD digital tax framework. Some background first: On October 8th 2021, the OECD announced a ground-breaking tax deal for the digital age. The OECD’s two-pillar approach intends to take unilateral digital tax measures off the table and avoid trade wars over digital service taxes. The new tax deal, signed by 137 out of 141 member states, representing over 90% of global GDP, will allocate around USD 125 billion in profits to countries around the world. The implementation of Pillars 1 and 2 follows separate paths with the plan for implementation for […]

Back in 2019, Steve Song at Many Possibilities wrote a blog post explaining how spectrum auctions led to worse outcomes for competition and rural access. The high reserve price of auctions was a barrier to entry to any apart from the large operators. The result was unused spectrum. Zambia is the latest example: In April 2022, it invited bids for spectrum in 800MHz and 2600MHz. MTN and Airtel were awarded spectrum for a price of USD 41.5 million. 40MHz in the 2600MHz band was left unsold. ZICTA plans on putting this up for auction again in Q3 2022, along with […]

Airtel Africa released its financial results this week: Revenues increased by 21.3% from US$ 3.8 to US$ 4.7 billion. EBITDA margin increased from 46% to 49%. The Vodafone Group also reported its financial results: group revenue grew by 4% from €43.81 to €45.6 billion. Airtel Africa subscriber numbers grew by 8.7%. In Europe, Vodafone’s mobile customers grew by 1.5%. These two examples illustrate a simple point: mobile operators in Europe and Africa are at different stages of the growth curve. African operators do not need to be as focused on cost control compared to European operators because their subscriber base […]

Uganda’s parliament has directed the Uganda Communications Commission (UCC) to open discussions with operators on making all data plans unlimited. On the surface, this idea is appealing: why should data packages have limits? But exclusively providing unlimited data packages means that the link between data usage and revenues is then broken. This means that data usage can increase enormously without any additional revenues for the telco. There are costs associated, especially in mobile, with providing data and by divorcing data usage from revenues, there is no way to fully recoup these costs. The consequences of breaking the link between usage […]

Uganda has joined most countries around the world and expanded VAT to include non-resident digital platforms. Effective 1 July 2022, VAT of 18% will be charged on electronic services like web hosting, software and streaming services. This means that when a customer in Uganda purchases any of these services from a company like Amazon or Meta, the company must charge VAT of 18% and submit this charge to the Ugandan Revenue Authority. Uganda joins many other countries that have expanded VAT to digital services such as Kenya and South Africa and most developed countries around the world. According to the […]

In June, RIS launched the Next Generation Internet Index (NGII), a tool to measure a country’s readiness for the metaverse. The tool is intended to be aspirational because the targets are difficult to achieve. But the tool is also relevant for today, as Vodacom South Africa’s recent press release shows. Vodacom claimed that it had the best quality network in South Africa based on data from Tutela. Of course, competitors like MTN, called this claim nonsense based on data from Ookla that showed that MTN had a considerably better network. However, it doesn’t really matter if one network is slightly […]