Whatsapp and other social media networks are giving African mobile operators a run for their money.
As the number of smartphones and data packages grow across Africa, mobile operators are becoming increasingly concerned about the popularity of overseas-hosted over-the-top services eating into their potential to monetize traffic, ZDNet reported.
In South Africa, the average cost of sending a text message is R0.80 (6 cents USD), while messaging via Whatsapp can cost as little as R0.03 ($0.002 USD), Quartz reports.
Mobile operators like MTN are desperately trying to level the playing field. Over-the-top operators like Whatsapp are making gains without any investment and they should be regulated, said Mteto Nyati, CEO of MTN, South Africa No. 2 mobile network, in a Fin24 interview.
“You have to regulate them because clearly they’re making a huge amount of revenue on top of the infrastructure that the operators have paid for. Somehow they have to contribute towards the building of this infrastructure,” Nyati said.
Over-the-top apps or services provide products over the Internet that bypass traditional distribution. Services that come over the top generally cost less than the traditional method of delivery.
These include voice calling, messaging and video calling. Traditional mobile service providers grow increasingly frustrated as they battle declining revenues in their text messaging and voice segments.
Over-the-top services like Whatsapp aren’t completely bad for business, according to Quartz. They can help fuel data consumption — a growing revenue stream for network operators — if exploited well. CellC — the No. 3 mobile network in South Africa, gave customers free WhatsApp messaging for a year.
It worked so well that CellC now offers a WhatsApp bundle on the network as a permanent product — not a promotion — for a 5 rand ($0.38 USD) fee.
These are 10 social networks with the largest market share in South Africa, according to the Global Web Index Q4 2014, We Are Social worldwide report 2015. We’ve ranked them in order from least to most market share.
Sources: Quartz; Fin24, GlobalWebIndex, ZDNet, Techopedia, ITWebAfrica.
