With a population of over 42 million people, there is an incredible scope for growth in all the country’s sectors, says the organisation’s statement availed to The Citizen on Saturday recently.“But while the country is on a steady growth path to better Internet connections and ICT, development is still required and improvements made,” it adds.
IT News Africa recently compiled a list depicting the general state of ICT in the country, and took a look at the various aspects of the sector.
While Africa’s Internet penetration is only 13.5 per cent, which is way below the world average of 32.7 per cent, Tanzania ranks as one of Africa’s top countries when it comes to the number of users on the net. The country ranks 6th on World Internet Stats’ chart with 4.9 million users, just below South Africa with 6.8 million users. In December 2000, Tanzania had only 115,000 people connected to the Internet, but that number has grown significantly since then.
A recent study revealed that more than 4.9 million people in the country now access the Internet on a daily basis, out of the population of over 42 million people - a penetration rate of 11.5 per cent of the population.
Although the country has a large number of people with access to the Internet, the figures for social network Facebook tell a different story. Facebook’s global user numbers are bordering on close to a billion, but Tanzania had only 414, 540 Facebook users as of December 31, last year.
That represents a one per cent penetration rate.
“It is no secret that mobile Internet usage is on the rise in Africa, and Tanzania is a good example of that,” notes the statement.
In 2010, the nation only had 3,150 fixed broadband connections. That is one connection for every 0.001 people, in a country where 4.9 million people have access to the Internet.
Tanzania also has a large number of registered websites, with 339,712 that have the .tz Internet TLD. That is 7.79 IP addressed for every 1,000 people.
Tanzania recently launched their first offering of commercially-available LTE (4G) technology for mobile Internet, beating African heavyweight South Africa. Mobile operator Smile Telecoms launched the service in Dar es Salaam and makes use of the 800MHz frequency band.
Vodacom Tanzania also became only the second country in Africa to switch on its 3G High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) service, and it was only available in Dar es Salaam. It was also the first and exclusive Tanzanian carrier to launch video call, video messaging and 3G HSDPA USB Modem.
ICT in Tanzania is regulated and governed by the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA) - an independent authority for postal, broadcasting and electronic communications industries. The TCRA is accountable to the Communications and Technology ministry.
Tanzania’s economy has been showing solid growth rates of between five per cent and eight per cent every year since 2000 which remained virtually unharmed by the global economic crisis. For the period 2012-2016, the International Monetary Fund predicts GDP growth at between 6-8 per cent per annum.
Mining and tourism are main industry sectors. However, the country continues to suffer from underdeveloped infrastructure, including roads, railways, electricity and telecommunications. The government has actively embraced the principles of competition and a private sector including foreign participation as a means of rapidly advancing economic and social development. According to a report released early this month titled Telecoms, Mobile, Broadband and Forecasts – 2012, policy reforms have led to the telecom sector becoming one of the more liberal ones in Africa.
However, high import tariffs on telecoms equipment and taxes on telephone facilities by various authorities are still placing a burden on investors and operators.
“Tanzania has two fixed-line operators (TTCL and Zantel) and eight operational mobile networks, with four additional players licensed under the new converged regulatory regime. With four major operators – Vodacom, Bharti Airtel (formerly Zain), Tigo and Zantel – the mobile market broke the 50 per cent penetration barrier at the end of 2010, but subscriber growth slowed to 20 per cent,” the report reads in part.
“The year was characterised by a price war which inflicted heavy subscriber losses on the smaller operators in 2011,” it adds.The document further notes that new converged licensing regime has brought a large number of new players into the market.
The liberalisation of voice over internet protocol (VoIP) telephony as well as the introduction of third generation (3G) mobile services and wireless broadband networks is boosting the Internet sector which has been hampered by the low level of development of the traditional fixed-line network.
“Following the launch of 3G mobile broadband services, the mobile networks are becoming the country’s leading internet service providers on the back of their extensive national infrastructure and existing subscriber bases in the voice market.
“The additional revenue from data services is badly needed in an almost entirely prepaid environment with rapidly falling voice ARPU. Another new income source is mobile money transfer and m-banking.”
The landing of the first fibre optic international submarine cable in the country in 2009 and 2010 has revolutionised the market which up to that point completely depended on expensive satellite connections. In parallel, the government has switched on the first phase of a national fibre backbone network to connect population centres around the country. However, the cost of international internet bandwidth has so far not come down by as much and not as quickly as expected.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Augustine Sangi
Quelle/Source: The Citizen, 30.06.2012
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