Trends & Forecasts

Growth has been steady in Pakistan although there have been setbacks to the country’s 3G licensing process which is due to take place this year...

Home to one of the world’s most isolated cities, the fabled Timbuctu, and with a generally challenging geography for the provision of telecommunication services, Mali has market penetration rates below African averages in all market sectors except mobile where it is now racing towards the 100% mark..

 As a result of heavy investments in the telecom sector since the mid-1990s, Tunisia has one of the most developed telecommunications infrastructures in Northern Africa and sports some of the continent’s highest market penetration rates...

Low penetration in Tanzania leaves plenty of room for growth over the next five years, but operators need to capitalise on the rural market potential...

Throughout 2011 the societal and political unrest in many Arab countries, termed the Arab Spring, fundamentally changed the progress and pace at which telecommunications infrastructure has, and will continue to be, developed in these countries...

Kenya's mobile market during H111 has seen a significant slowdown in overall subscriber growth...

 An intensifying battle between mobile and fixed-line services is increasing price-based competition in Indonesia, with the result that although subscriber numbers continue to rise, customers are spending less...

Although the Philippines has seen strong mobile subscriber growth this year, saturation looms and competition could soon be damaged by a major acquisition...

In light of new data published by the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission of Sri Lanka, the island nation’s mobile subscriber growth over the next five years will likely be lower than expected...

One of the last countries in the Middle East to liberalise, the telecom market of the United Arab Emirates has benefited from competition, evident from falling tariff prices...

Since the onset of competition Oman's telecoms market has developed in leaps and bounds...

With many markets in Central Asia acting as test-beds of sorts for new technologies, BMI has catalogued the more recent developments in the mobile and internet sectors of the region...

At the end of March 2010 there were 53.3mn subscribers in the Saudi mobile market, according to market data published by the CITC...

Global mobile subscriptions will reach over six billion by the end of this year and the Asia-Pacific region will account for more than half of the worldwide figure in 2011...

Nigeria's mobile market saw a surprise contraction of the mobile subscriber base during the three months to June 30 2011...

Boosted adoption rates have seen mobile subscriber numbers on the rise in Iraq...

Although fixed-line is declining, Bangladesh’s burgeoning mobile market has witnessed healthy growth...

Developing Telecoms' Africa blogger Tom Makau takes a look at the measures African operators will need to adopt in order to cope with the widespread adoption of smartphones across the continent...

Information and communication are at the heart of any modern business, and thanks to advances in technology these two previously disparate areas have begun to blur into one, creating what has become known as Information Communication Technology...

Political upheavals notwithstanding, Côte d’Ivoire has benefited from sophisticated developments in its telecom sector - and a short-term misstep is unlikely to upset a long term trend towards growth...

South Africa's mobile market leaders, Vodacom and MTN, are experiencing an impressive comeback following a massive loss of mobile customers in H209 and H110...

Kenya has long been one of the most prosperous telecoms markets in Africa, and while saturation looms, short-term growth will remain strong...

Based on operator figures from the first half of 2011, Thailand’s mobile market has performed more positively than might have been expected...

Subscriber growth in Ghana has exceeded expectations in the face of mandatory SIM registration and mobile number portability...

Intense competition has negatively affected Vietnam’s ARPU levels and the country’s mobile market is fast-approaching saturation...

Uganda is one of the fastest and most consistently growing economies in Africa. Fibre, mobile broadband and mobile banking are revolutionising the country’s telecom sector...

Fixed voice household penetration has proved resilient in most parts of Western Europe, but in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the proportion of mobile-only households had increased to 41% at the end of 2010. Senior Analyst at Analysys Mason Emma Buckland explores the regional factors that have brought about fixed-line abandonment in CEE, the main reasons why CEE fixed-line operators have been largely unsuccessful in stemming it and our expectations for this trend in the next five years...

The Pakistani mobile market has emerged from two years of low growth between 2009 and 2010, which averaged at 1.7%, to mark a quarterly increase of 3.6% y-o-y in terms of subscribers...

Although intense competition is driving down ARPUs and market saturation is reducing subscriber growth opportunities, operators in Oman continue to invest in modern fixed and mobile networks - a move that will facilitate the rollout of higher value services in the future...

At the end of March 2011, Sri Lanka’s mobile sector had a total of 17.852mn subscribers, following 393,000 net additions in the quarter...

Despite being Africa’s latest exporter of oil, Chad has one of the least developed telecommunications markets in the world...

Uganda’s mobile sector is predicted to grow through to the end of 2015, while broadband subscriber numbers are expected to rise significantly between 2013 and 2015...

Although operators in Cambodia have a tendency to overstate subscriber figures to boost market share, growth does appear strong in the Southeast Asian country...