To the casual observer, it might come as startling news that poverty-stricken sub-Saharan Africa is now the fastest growing wireless market anywhere. But it's no mystery why Africa has leapfrogged landlines and gone wireless.

Poorly managed, endemically corrupt national telecommunications monopolies can't afford to lay new lines or maintain old ones, leaving most sub-Saharan countries with a landline teledensity--the total number of subscribers per 100 persons--of less than one.

That compares with more than 10 lines per 100 people in Latin America and more than 64 per 100 in the United States. Indeed, Tokyo and New York City each has more fixed-line telephones than the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

But thanks to wireless networks, overall teledensity in Africa is skyrocketing. Growing political stability has helped to attract foreign investors to a region decimated by more than 20 major civil wars over the last 50 years. These firms have successfully picked up the customers that the national telecom monopolies left hanging on the line.

The number of mobile subscribers in 30 sub-Saharan African countries, not including South Africa, rose from zero in 1996 to more than 82 million in late 2004, according to the latest statistics from the International Telecommunications Union. In Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, and Tanzania, annual cellular growth rates are running in excess of 300 percent.

Nigeria, Africa's largest country, with 140 million inhabitants, has only about 500,000 landlines, or approximately 1 for every 250 people. Since 2000, 19 million mobile phone subscribers have signed on, and the Nigerian Communications Commission projects the total number of subscribers to grow to 50 million by 2010.

The boom has resulted in a whole new service economy for a region sorely in need of an economic boost. The question is, how long can the boom last?

This articles appears in full within the current issue of IEEE Spectrum Magazine

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