African broadband market to triple by 2015

After years of slow growth and outright despair at to whether broadband would ever take off on the African continent, the market is inching ever closer to a tipping point, according to a new report from AfricaNext Investment Research, The Future of African Broadband.After years of slow growth and outright despair at to whether broadband would ever take off on the African continent, the market is inching ever closer to a tipping point, according to a new report from AfricaNext Investment Research, The Future of African Broadband.

As submarine cables find their way along Africa’s coastlines, the African continent is slowly emerging from what the firm calls the “Dark Ages of African bandwidth”. Close to three million new broadband connections were added by African operators in 2009, taking overall market size to 7.6mn. AfricaNext research projects this figure to treble to about 25mn by 2015, with a long term target of $8bn in Internet retail revenues.