Pre-paid billing is driving growth in the African telecoms market.

Even today, 90 per cent of South Africa’s mobile users are on pre-paid and with minimal fixed line and broadband roll-out to townships and conurbations where population concentration is highest, the mobile is fast becoming the window to the world of Internet and email for the bulk of the South African population.

And it’s a similar story elsewhere in Africa. By early last year about 90 per cent of all phone users on the entire continent were mobile phone subscribers.

Africa is never going to be cabled, the geography, sheer daunting size of the place, the immense cost that would be entailed and the constant theft of whatever copper infrastructure is deployed means that, for almost all Africans, mobile telecoms technology is the only possible and economically viable answer to the continent’s telecoms needs.

That said, and whilst mobile technology is perfectly suited to the African experience, were it not for the pre-paid sector, its take-up would have been negligible.

Thus, I hope you’ll forgive an old billing hand asserting that pre-paid billing is probably the single biggest contribution to the African communications industry and, in some cases, even to the continent’s GNP!

Furthermore, the availability of modern telecoms is now regarded as a prerequisite to economic growth. Indeed, the ITU has stated that: "Growth in Africa's mobile sector has defied all predictions. Africa remains the region with the highest annual growth rate in mobile subscribers.” The UN agency adds that no less than 65 million new subscribers were added to operator rolls during 2007.

The ITU report continued, “By the beginning of 2008, there were over a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers in Africa and mobile penetration had risen from just one in 50 people in 2000 to almost one third of the population today."

And that’s already old news.