Predictions that the smart phone industry will continue to  experience boom throughout 2011 in Nigeria have led to rising concerns about imminent capacity crunch and possible network crash in some of the telecom operators in the country.
BusinessWorld Intelligence can reveal that two GSM networks that occupy the third and fourth positions in the Nigerian market in terms of subscriber acquisition and a leading CDMA network may be consumed by the upsurge due to their inability to cope with the demands of the high data-consumption devices in the short run. International Data Corporation (IDC), IT research firm, predicts the African smart phone market will expand by nearly 50 per cent in 2011, and these devices will account for almost one handset in five sold in the region. Nigeria alone is expected to consume about 17 per cent of this increase.
Furthermore, smartphones are said to be fast replacing the traditional mobile handset across all the segments of mobile users. Accenture said in its new survey that ownership of basic mobile phones dropped from 79 per cent in 2009, to 65 per cent in 2010. In the same period, ownership of smartphones quadrupled, from eight per cent to 32 per cent.
Investigations also reveal that in the next five years, smartphones will make up more than half the cellular market in Nigeria.
“This growth, combined with rising consumer expectation to be able to access ever more complex services on their mobile devices, means that demand for mobile data is higher than ever before,” a senior executive in MTN Nigeria confirmed and noted that the company is making adequate preparation to cope with the expected surge through frequent network capacity building.
Specifically, operators would need to start building out their networks with next-generation technologies, such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 4G connectivity, to address the situation. Nonetheless, even these steps may not be enough to cater for the billions of new data users expected to flood the market over the next five years.
Therefore, the industry must start to think about maximizing smartphone infrastructure and improving their efficiency in order to most effectively utilize existing capacity.
With a growing number of users consuming bandwidth-intensive mobile data services, such as web browsing, video/media streaming, social networking and other data-hungry applications, analysts are worried whether the cellular telecommunications industry is heading for a capacity crunch.
IDC particularly pointed out that with the number of smartphone users expected to surpass the one billion mark by 2013, cellular networks and mobile technologies are only going to come under further pressure from a growing subscriber base.
“This may result in an increased number of dropped calls, slow webpage-loading and applications which cannot pull down the required data, all of which combined will deliver a poor end-user experience and lead to frustrated, angry customers,” it said.
Only recently, Engineer Juwah, executive vice chairman of the Nigerian Communications Commission, said the regulator is prepared more than ever before to deal with any operator whose quality of service is below the standard set by the commission.