Nothing better illustrates our inability to foresee the future than the unexpected, non-linear growth and exponential impact of mobile services than adoption trends over about the last decade in Africa.
In 2002, roughly 10 percent of people owned a mobile phone in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya and Ghana. Now, adoption ranges from 65 percent to 83 percent. In just a little over a decade, mobile usage grew 600 percent to 800 percent.
Today, mobile phone ownership is as common as in the United States (89 percent adoption) in South Africa.
At the same time, fixed network adoption penetration in the seven countries surveyed (Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda) is close to zero.
About two percent of respondents surveyed across these nations say they have a working landline telephone in their house.
It is fair to say that as recently as 1980, few would have predicted most of the world’s people would be connected to communications networks by about 2015, solving a major development and social problem that had seemed nearly intractable.
Back then, the only feasible solution was deemed to be the traditional fixed telephone network. Mobility changed all that.
That precedent is one reason why many believe supplying Internet access to the world’s people likewise will be solved, with a few decades, if not within a single decade, by the use of non-tethered, mobile or other spectrum-based networks.
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