Mobile Broadband in Africa and the Middle East: Lte Profit Drivers and Outlook

Mobile Broadband in Africa and the Middle East: LTE Profit Drivers and Outlook

Mobile Broadband in Africa and the Middle East: LTE Profit Drivers and Outlook,\' a Telecom Insider Report by Pyramid Research, tackles the question of how LTE is positioned in Africa and the Middle East and what its growth drivers and consequences for mobile broadband are. It reviews the existing LTE deployments and assesses uptake vis-à-vis (and along with) 3G adoption and rollouts. We analyze the current circumstances and expectations for mobile broadband in AME by using three main pillars: revenue drivers (services, devices, pricing models), cost (regulations and deployment models) and structural dynamics (socioeconomic and competitive characteristics). Key Findings LTE is commercially present in about 20 countries in Africa and the Middle East. In the wealthy Gulf countries almost all mobile operators use LTE as their new basis of competition for mobile subscriptions, whereas in Africa the use of LTE is mostly limited to fixed-use cases for broadband access, following WiMAX migrations. Mobile operators in Africa are waiting for the digital dividend, scheduled for mid-2015, and the release of frequencies in the sub-1GHz spectrum before aggressive LTE deployments. Until then, pure broadband LTE companies have a window of opportunity to expand their subscriber bases, while Internet companies, such as Microsoft and Google, will have time to lobby for the utilization of TV white spaces. In the Gulf markets, pricing of mobile data is often uniform across 3G and LTE networks, while in Africa, the arrival of LTE broadband brought with it a wave of segmentation in the packaging and pricing of mobile data, for instance through data sharing and time-of-day packages. Although network sharing or wholesale LTE networks are possibilities, unfavorable competitive dynamics in most AME markets hamper the development of such cost-effective deployment models. In the Gulf markets, LTE will account...