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The hype about cloud computing and data centres can often seem overblown when you visit some of Africa’s smaller markets but in many of the larger markets, data centres and the services they enable are now becoming an established part of enabling both consumer and corporate services. A recent conference in South Africa provided the opportunity to look at the challenges and floated the idea that the challenging circumstances of Africa may offer it the opportunity to become a pioneer in green, energy efficient solutions.

Access to reliable and transparent information helps markets work effectively. There is plenty of mobile subscriber data for Africa, whether from company reporting requirements or from the continent’s better regulators. However, with honourable exceptions, most regulators have not believed the Internet was sufficiently important to warrant tracking its subscribers. Now as Africa’s Internet steps into the limelight, it becomes important to know more.

Tanzania is making big strides in rolling out its national backbone and connecting to all of its neighbours. Also at the beginning of April this year, it dropped its bandwidth prices and amended its multi-drop access to make it cheaper. Local operators are pleased about these developments but would like to see rates come down further. Russell Southwood spoke to Peter Nogota, Head, NICTBB about what’s been happening.

Profitable online business models are hard to come by in Africa because although the number of Internet users has shot up, it’s still hard to get a critical mass of regular users and make money from what they do. Russell Southwood talks to Johan Nel, CEO, Umuntu Media about its forthcoming launch of Mimiboard.

The available African consumer surveys show there is an audience for computer and mobile phone games but there is little evidence that anyone is much focused on trying to produce local games. For the brave few games developers already doing it, the business model is both confused and constrained. Russell Southwood looks at how African gaming might get out of the box and talks to Kenyan developer Cliff Onyari of Virtual Designs.

At the end of March, Gateway Communications invited a panel of people and a selected industry audience to look at the “Future of African connectivity”. With the exception of a small amount of disquiet over shared infrastructure, there was almost universal consensus about the three items picked out in the headline above. Russell Southwood mulls over the long-term view.

The business of running a mobile operation in Africa in comparison to Europe or any developed countries should be roughly the same but there are major differences and this starts with the core element of a mobile operator’s network, the base station. Running base stations in Africa is different from running base stations in Europe. The issues around powering a base station for example are altogether dealt with differently in Africa. Isabelle Gross looks at what it takes to African mobile operators to ensure that their base stations are up and running 24/7.

Back in December 2011 Balancing Act published an article on mobile data revenue which highlighted that data revenues for mobile operators in Sub-Sahara Africa remain tiny in most countries with the exception of South Africa and to a lesser extent Kenya. In the last couple of years many African mobile operators have launched 3G networks and more rollouts are in the pipeline. These are high CAPEX investments at stake and as in a poker game, the player needs to have the right cards in its hand to win the hand.

Increased bandwidth in Africa has opened up new opportunities for cloud-based services. Unfortunately discussions about these kinds of cloud-based services have generated…well, clouds fully of empty corporate jargon. This week Russell Southwood looks at some different examples of actual cloud-based services that are being used successfully in Africa to try and get a handle on where the opportunities lie.

For over a decade, Africa’s ICT entrepreneurs have struggled to make sense of how to innovate and make money on a continent that was largely connected to the outside world by satellite and extremely expensive fibre. Now with cheaper wholesale bandwidth and falling retail prices, the season is going from an unforgiving winter to perhaps a long Summer of Love. Russell Southwood looks at the changes afoot that are helping Africa’s ICT entrepreneurs stand a better chance of success.