Russel Southwood is one of the leading authorities on African technology and communications. Russel is CEO of Balancing Act Africa, a consultancy and online publishing company specialising in telecoms, Internet and broadcasting in Africa. Erik of Ushahidi and ihub considers Russel ‘to be the most well-connected person in the African tech scene, he also happens to have one of the best macro view of what’s going on across the continent in the established tech and media worlds‘

We managed to have a brief chat with Russel Southwood on video. Russel talks about the new opportunities that are presenting themselves especially with unique convergences, mobile and the ubiquity of mobile money:

Russel recently wrote (with Sylvian Beletre) a very interesting article sighting the top ICT trends to watch out for in the emerging African continent. The trends are:

Africa now officially a new emerging market thanks to ICT demand: ICT growth – particularly within the mobile sector – has focused interest on the continent as a place with interesting emerging markets in North and sub-Saharan Africa (particularly South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal and Ghana).

More telecoms infrastructure investments: 2011 will see renewed telecoms infrastructure investments, not only in mobile and satellite but also in fixed infrastructure including national fibre backbones and local data centres to meet growing demand.

New race for spectrum ownership: the start of a potential war for spectrum. Several telecoms licences need to be renewed and ICT regulators will start to call for bids. Particular pressure is coming from both the introduction of WiMAX and before too long LTE (Kenya’s Safaricom is testing it and Vodacom says it’s on their road map).

More mergers and acquisition and partnerships: As competition and the need for more revenues increase, Balancing Act expects strategic partnership between operators, vendors and even TV players. The most successful players will be the ones who form alliances with key players in the equipment, IT, content providers (ie. media companies, especially audiovisual) to offer a wider range of services to their customers. Affordable bundled packages, especially multi-play will start to emerge in the most advanced African countries.

Demand for new models, technologies and apps: Niche competitors may yet have a more successful service focus than the “do-everything, control everything” big company. Operators and governments will have to choose between several complex and expensive technology upgrades (LTE, Wimax, 3-4G).

More ICT equipment: As with telecoms services spending, IT spending is expected to grow by around 10% across the African continent. IT investments in the public and private sector are due to boost IT levels and standards.

New web strategies: Large players have invested in their new web strategies and encouraged content production across the African continent. Local organisations in Africa will need to further invest in their websites to get wider visibility if they want to attract more clients and partners.

More applications: As ARPU has been decreasing over the past few years, telecoms service providers are looking for ways to increase margins with new applications.

Better customer relationships: Fibre roll planned between now and 2015 along the African coasts will involve more aggressive efforts to attract customers, enterprises and service providers to join their networks. Operators will then need to establish strategies in order to keep them loyal.

More ICT training: the growth of more complex ICT usage will require more local competencies