2012 is set to be an exciting year in the local cellular market with SMS and MMS facing competition from IM clients, spectrum assignment discussions and social media developments.<\/p>\n
MyBroadband BusinessTech asked some of South Africa\u2019s mobile and cellular leaders what they think the biggest trends will be in the market this year.<\/p>\n
MTN<\/a><\/strong> CEO Karel Pienaar<\/a><\/strong> believes that Africa will be a great growth area.<\/p>\n \u201cAfrica\u2019s growth is not slowing down. MTN is uniquely positioned to exploit opportunities ‘at scale’,\u201d says Pienaar.<\/p>\n \u201cAs an example, the entrance of new broadband operators, as well as Over The Top Players (OTTP) is increasing competitiveness in this space. Traditional messaging services (SMS, MMS) are facing growing challenges from IM clients,\u201d says Pienaar.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the major new opportunities are the potential to provide substitutes in the messaging, collaboration and applications space with our applications (with Facebook<\/a>, Google+<\/a>, Blackberry<\/a>, WhatsApp, Facetime, Viber etc.), to compete in this sphere.\u201d<\/p>\n According to Pienaar, the penetration of smart devices, increased broadband coverage and competitive data rates provide the platform to deliver feature rich services in both consumer and business markets such as multimedia, mobile transactions, gaming and the like.<\/p>\n \u201cCloud Computing is also gaining traction, so trends do point to an exciting year in telecommunications in 2012,\u201d said Pienaar.<\/p>\n Alan Knott-Craig<\/strong><\/a>, who will take over as Cell C<\/a> CEO<\/strong> in April 2012, says that Mobile broadband will probably be top-of-mind in the industry this year again.<\/p>\n Knott-Craig added that the growth of social networks, and their propensity to own customers, should dominate the approach of cellular operators to customers.<\/p>\n Knott-Craig also warned that the local telecoms space needs immediate action to ensure that consumers\u2019 hopes are not dashed again.<\/p>\n \u201cUnless the national fibre infrastructure starts fulfilling its promise by being ready for service – and unless the regulator understands the fundamental role that spectrum plays in speed, quality and price for the last mile – it may just be another year of abortive hope,\u201d said Knott-Craig.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" MTN SA CEO, Karel Pienaar, and Cell C head, Alan Knott-Craig, discuss their predictions on the biggest trends in 2012 in the SA mobile space<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":703,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[43,42,26,1124,28],"class_list":["post-4825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mobile","tag-alan-knott-craig","tag-cell-c","tag-headline","tag-karel-pienaar","tag-mtn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4825"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26552,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4825\/revisions\/26552"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/703"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}