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4G/5G

Africa's Mobile Operators Should Focus Investments on 4G and Mobile Finance: Poll

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Africa's mobile operators need to focus their investments on building out their 4G/LTE access networks and targeting resources into mobile finance platforms during the next five years.

That's the key takeaway from Connecting Africa's reader poll, Capex Priorities, which asked: 'In which technologies should Africa's mobile operators prioritize their investments during the next five years?'

Respondents were allowed to select up to three of the seven options.

As the graphic below shows, while 4G/LTE radio access and mobile finance platforms garnered the most votes, IoT platforms (not surprisingly) also attracted a lot of support, while investment in video delivery systems was not regarded as important as the other options.

The focus on building out mobile broadband access should not come as a surprise: 3G and 4G mobile data services have the capacity to transform lives, communities and whole economies across Africa, and while 4G services have been launched in major urban areas in many countries there's a lot of pent up demand for mobile broadband services, and affordable 4G devices, that can enable reliable access to multiple useful applications.

You can still vote in this poll and add your views: Click on Capex Priorities.

And vote now in our new poll, Cloud Services: In Demand?.

— The staff, Connecting Africa

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