Tanzania Telecommunications Report

The switching on of the SEACOM cable has caused excitement all around East Africa, but especially in the places where it actually lands, including Tanzania. The provision of plentiful, reliable, inexpensive international bandwidth is being credited with ushering in a new era of broadband connectivity. However, the improvements that it can bring are unlikely to be felt immediately, as there are many other developments that need to take place in order for any kind of broadband revolution to take place. As well as the international bandwidth, Tanzania needs to keep developing its internal, high capacity backbone infrastructure in order to facilitate the expansion and improvement of broadband access to more of the population.

Still, the fact that the cable is in place is one piece of the puzzle, and the rest will slowly start to follow.

Tanzania does have high-speed mobile broadband networks in place, in the form of HSDPA from Vodacom, although coverage is a long way from being truly extensive. Still, once Vodacom has finalised a deal for access to SEACOM's bandwidth, which, at the time of writing, has not happened, users of this service should find it much more efficient, in some areas at least. Even with mobile technology, a lack of high-capacity backbone infrastructure can be limiting, as the mobile network's backbone infrastructure has often been built primarily with voice traffic in mind and can lack broadband level capacity.

Depending on the terms of the access and the parties involved, the access should become cheaper for consumers, too, although there may be even more of a lag in this effect Growth in Tanzania's mobile market was a little muted in Q109, thanks to Zantel, which lost over 500,000 mobile subscribers that quarter. It also succeeded in adding a substantial amount to its fixed-line subscriber base, much more than in previous quarters. The origins of these changes have not yet become clear. The net additions to the three leading mobile operators, Vodacom, Zain and Tigo, are more in keeping with a normal quarter, so BMI does not believe that growth has significantly slowed in the market in general. This being said, the Zantel effect will be felt in terms of total market size for a little while, and it has led to a slight downgrading of our forecast.

Thanks to significant drops in ARPUs, which have been felt across Africa but perhaps particularly harshly in Tanzania, the country has slipped down our Business Environment Ratings table from third to seventh.