Telcos in Africa will have to wake up to a new competitive redesign because competition is not necessarily going to be all local. Typically, every 10 years, something new happens. The Voice Telephony age of the 2000s, the Mobile Internet age of 2010s, and the Application Utility one we are in the 2020s. By the 2030s, I expect the satellite era to be here at scale.
A massive disintermediation is coming, and what GSM operators did to CDMA companies will happen to some of them, from satellite operators. Cost and coverage will continue to be the factors, and the sats have an opportunity.
One thing needs to happen: satellite phones need to have the form factor, size, shape, and general feel of terrestrial phones. Huawei Mate 60 Pro has shown that it is possible. I now await for SpaceX Starlink Phones to arrive because it is the right thing to do. And by the time Apple adds that in the iPhone, a new basis of competition is born, and we will see a new telco reborn.
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Not really. I am writing about it because it has a feature other phones do not have. I am not sure I have written about it until it unveiled the sat feature. And if another does better, we forget about it.
— Ndubuisi Ekekwe (@ndekekwe) October 6, 2023
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