AfricaCom

* International bandwidth growing again: Afterwards a period when people were going, we've got all this bandwidth what are we going to do with, international fibre sales are on the move again. According to Chris Wood, CEO, WIOCC it has nearly completely sold its initial 30 GB allocation and will upgrade to 160 GB which he thinks will sell through in 2 years. The drivers for all this growth? Mobile Internet and WiMAX coverage.

Liquid Telecom's network stretches north. There are gaps everywhere between these clusters of networks and some blank spaces however the task of addressing this is far less daunting. Those endless maps with coloured lines that were "meat and drink" of conferences like this for several years are now a reality. Pricing remains an issue at both national, cross-border and local levels. Holding back the development of things like data centres and cloud computing, the latter being something of a buzz word at the event. Two telcos this week - Vodacom SA and Orange Kenya - have plans to get it beyond the "blah-blah" phase. One operator was saying that international bandwidth was now 20-40% of total delivery cost with national bandwidth making up 60-80%.

The fibre storm

* Satellite operators seem to have weathered the fibre storm: Satellite operators and resellers were remarkably chipper this year compared to last year. SkyVision's new CEO Doron Ben Sira said earnings were holding steady and that it had moved from drawing most of its earnings from 4-5 countries and was equivalent amounts of earnings across 20 countries.

Operators have seen their IP trunking business disappear and the number of remote base stations is falling in other words than growing nevertheless they have got out and found new clients. "All the world and its aunt" are getting into the broadcast business where prices remain rock solid: how about some competitive offers?

The nearly horizon

On the nearly horizon, Kevin Viret of Yahsat says it will launch its new products early then year and says both pricing and sales channel approach "will shake the market up." Furthermore into the future 03B is nevertheless looking at a 2013 launch date with prices between US$500-750 per meg. It has changed its business model slightly to offer slightly sub 100 MB offers asymmetrically. But, the idea that it will be good for redundancy purposes looks less and less compelling as the volume of fibre being shifted keeps ramping up.

* Mobile content gets more and more interesting: Google's Think Mobile event on Monday was pitching the growth of smartphones in the South African market, which is probably right. Nevertheless the "ground-moving" moment seems to be happening with the much more numerous feature-phone part of the handset pyramid.

We met Australia's biNU mobile who have a feature phone content platform that has over 2 million users globally. It's a low bandwidth optimized cloud-based service and it offers an in the extreme interesting content offer including books from the Guttenberg Project. It is getting user numbers in the hundreds of thousands and these are certainly the early birds on the horizon.

Comparing notes on mobile content in India and Africa with Arvind Rao, CEO of OnMobile was fascinating. He is part of what seems like a wave of Indian vendors who have followed Airtel into the market. He says that his sales in Africa are ahead of where he expected at this hour. He told us that one big trend in India was independent musicians using mobile as a means of distribution. He as well said that Indian music labels three years ago had something like 5% of their earnings from online nevertheless now they had 40-50% and of that proportion 80% was coming from mobile.

The interconnect moment arrive?

* Mobile payment - when will the interconnect moment arrive? When mobile operators first started, operators didn't connect to each other because they believed that people would prefer their service and in this fashion it would attract greater numbers. And at the time someone agreed to interconnect and the networking effect kicked in and the rest is history. M-money is going through a similar cycle nevertheless below the radar there are a number of operators that are not completely happy with their proprietary, on-net solution.

The Nigerians have set the pace by saying platforms must operate with the banks which has meant a slightly more open process of platforms getting to market. Platforms like Paga in Nigeria and Mobipay in Tanzania may currently be small in user numbers however may right away they may become flavor of the month. The issue for operators is that M-Money is not a highly profitable business yet as with everything mobile, they do it because some else started doing it.

Larger players are taking an interest. POS operator Verifone has bought into New Zealand's Mobilis and is offering an m-wallet platform that has Nearly Field Communications on its "road map". The current barrier to retail shopping in places like Nakumatt with say M-Pesa in Kenya is that the check-out staff and clients can't be bothered to go through the slower process of paying this way. Cash is nevertheless faster nevertheless imagine a swipe and pay system. It's a ways off yet it's coming