7th CMI Conference Aalborg University

Radio Systems Lab at KTH in Kista is studying wide areas within mobile communications, from purely theoretical to industry-near research adding tele-economic analysis and energy efficiency. CMI (The Center for Communication, Media and Information Technologies) at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, has an even broader scope, also including media, society, and behavior study aspects. This year, the theme of the conference was “Mobile Communications in Developing Countries”, an area CMI has studied for many years.

The program consisted of two days of educational and inspirational paper presentations and industry/society reviews of current topics, including the impact of ICT on the positive economic development in Africa, ITUs role and Private-public partnerships. There were several book launches made during the conference.

I presented the paper “‘Creating innovative types of mobile network operators: A market model study of mobile infrastructure sharing in Africa”, which analysed the current mobile infrastructure network sharing situation in Africa. The analysis shows that network sharing is developing faster than in other regions and also include examples of network sharing that have not been seen in other regions. The technical solutions,  regulatory aspects and business drivers were described. One example is the new LTE operator (Korea Telecom) in Rwanda, which will run a single LTE  network (using 180MHz spectrum) during 25 years and sell capacity whole-sale to the existing operators.

Another example of network sharing included sharing of the ecosystem of the successful m-pesa mobile payment solution in Kenya. M-pesa, channeling a stunning 25% of Kenya’a GDP, was a hot topic: two additional papers studied the solution.

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