A new report published on recently by Pyramid Research shows that the future of Uganda’s telecommunications industry depends largely on the mass market and mobile technology expansion.

The report entitled “Uganda: Intense Competition, Mobile Rollouts and Lower Prices to Boost 3G Services” said a mixture of technologically simpler yet sticky data services, such as mobile money and more advanced applications using 3G, will be the key to revenue generation in the mobile segment.”

The report was based on data from Pyramid’s research and analyses in both the fixed and mobile sectors and tracks the market shares of technologies and services, and monitors the introduction and spread of new technologies.

“Pyramid believes that the main drivers of growth in Uganda will be the continuing expansion of mobile subscriptions into rural areas, declining costs of voice services, as well as international bandwidth thanks to connections to coastal countries with undersea cables, further investments in 3G and intensifying competition for broadband networks.”

Ministry of communications assistant deputy minister John Yunbi believes the report creates a solid framework for companies looking to continue to boost the IT sector in the country.
“We have seen a lot of growth in recent years in the telecoms sector and this new report from Pyramid definitely highlights how we can continue to push forward in the years to come and what is important for our success,” said Yunbi.

On the mobile sector, “the low penetration level, along with the presence of seven mobile operators, will generate increasing voice and data revenue. In the fixed segment, urban areas offer vast opportunity for growth of broadband, and deployment of fixed wireless can aid further expansion,” the report added.

Kenya’s government has given telecom operators in the country an extension to bid on a 4G spectrum license, the country’s ministry of communications announced this week.

The 14 September 2011 deadline has been extended by two weeks despite an initial lack of interest by local telecom firms. The new deadline has been set for September 27 2011.

Previously, 3G licenses were awarded to each operator in the country, but the new 4G license is to be tightly controlled by the government and offered to operators who must have at least 20% local ownership.

This new requirement has pushed Airtel and Essar’s Yu out of the bidding process. Safaricom and Telkom Kenya are able to bid, but according to the information ministry, neither of these two operators appear interested in the new license.
“No consortium had applied,” said Kenya’s Information Ministry Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo.

“We’ve given them more time to form consortia and that’s the reason we have extended the bidding period by two weeks,” said Ndemo.

Computer giant Microsoft unveiled new features and applications for their forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, but also let slip that Internet Explorer 10 won’t support any plug-ins or Adobe’s Flash, which is popular among many websites.

The company said that IE10 will be completely reliant on HTML5, while Flash and other plug-ins will still be available on the desktop version of the Windows 8 OS.

“Running Metro-style IE plug-in free improves battery life as well as security, reliability, and privacy for consumers. Plug-ins were important early on in the Web’s history. But the Web has come a long way since then with HTML5.

Providing compatibility with legacy plug-in technologies would detract from, rather than improve, the consumer experience of browsing in the Metro-style UI,” wrote Internet Explorer team leader Dean Hachamovitch on the Building Windows 8 blog.

Hachamovitch was quick to add that his team examined over 97 000 websites, and found that 62% of them fell back to HTML5 if a plug-in wasn’t present, so Flash isn’t always a necessity.

As for the end of Flash, Danny Winokur, vice president and general manager of Platform at Adobe says it still has some legs.

“We expect Windows desktop to be extremely popular for years to come (including Windows 8 desktop) and that it will support Flash just fine…In addition, we expect Flash based apps will come to Metro via Adobe AIR, much the way they are on Android, iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS today,” he wrote on the company blog.

MapIT, a South African digital mapping company, has been selected by SATNAV East Africa as its Mapping Data Provider for East Africa. SATNAV East Africa is Uganda’s pioneer in Global Positioning System [GPS] technology and GPS based consumer electronics.

Established in 2011, the company’s independent geographical data of East Africa has built up a vast digital database. “We would like to congratulate SATNAV East Africa for choosing MapIT,” said Etienne Louw, Managing Director of MapIT.

“With our detailed mapping datasets for Africa, we can assist SATNAV East Africa in achieving its business goals,” said Louw.
Vincent Okema, CEO SATNAV East Africa and Gerold Haug, Managing Partner SATNAV East Africa, worked with Louw to finalise the partnership.

“We are very pleased to be working with the dynamic team at MapIT, and look forward to an exciting and successful journey together,” said Okema.