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Developmental role of mobile communications technology
11 April 2007
This Day Online
The advent of mobile communications technology is fast impacting significantly on the socio-economic landscape of Nigeria and other African countries. In this report, Efem Nkanga appraises its crucial role in driving socio economic development on the African continent.
The world is still reeling from the global impact of mobile technology. The outstanding growth rate of mobile technology is expected to hit five billion subscribers globally by 2015, more than twice the connections of over two billion currently recorded. This is in line with the United Nations Millennium Development Declaration in September 2000 that half of the world's population should have ICT access by 2015.The high level of growth is mostly felt in emerging markets like Asia, China and Africa which experts predict represent 80 per cent of any future growth of the technology. This rapid growth has been largely influenced by the introduction of the GSM technology in these developing nations.
Telecoms experts all over the world unanimously agree that the mobile phone technology has emerged as the fastest growing technology in history. They also agree that it's the only technology that can adequately bridge the digital divide and enable the quest of global organisations in connecting the unconnected around the world by 2015. The technology is no doubt the cornerstone of the digital world and its tremendous growth is still unrelenting and ongoing with a thousand connections said to be made globally every minute. This is in itself an achievement given the fact that it took 12 years for the first billion users to experience the power of mobile technology. Global mobile shipments grew by 25 per cent last year reaching a record total of one billion units according to a research firm, Strategy Analytics. This no doubt is a significant milestone that has taken about 23 years to achieve.
The research firm added that in revenue terms, Japanese-Swedish firm Sony Ericsson, became the world's third largest handset vendor, overtaking Samsung for the first time with $4.9 billion (£2.5bn) compared to Samsung's $4.6bn.The firm also stated that emerging markets, notably India and Africa, will continue to be the main engines driving the growth of volume.
According to Neil Mawston, associate director at Strategy Analytics: "Mobile phone sales have exploded from less than 100,000 units in 1983 to 100 million units in 1997 and have now passed the one billion level in 2006''. He added that ''during that time, mobile phones have become a critical driver of innovation and profit for the world's semiconductor, memory, battery and display industries."
No doubt, the history of the mobile phone makes this year the year of the centennial anniversary of the mobile phone and statistics reveal that with the ongoing exploding growth of mobile communications technology, especially in emerging markets, soon every second person in the world will be connected to mobile technology, especially with the efforts of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and other global stakeholders to make this a reality.
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