Only one in three of the African population is currently subscribed to a mobile service, highlighting a major growth opportunity for regional operators that are able to extend affordable services into rural areas.

O2 UK has established itself as the best performing UK operator with regards to churn rates, a legacy of its two-year exclusive hold over the Apple iPhone, a successful loyalty programme and its pioneering SIM-only contract offers.

Launched a year ago, 3G now accounts for 15 percent of total connections in Vietnam, according to the latest GSMA Intelligence data. The three operators under state control - Mobifone, Vinaphone and Viettel – have recently met their 3G investment targets and the government is now turning its attention to LTE, within the last month giving the go-ahead for five state-owned telecom companies to test LTE.

The popularity of SIM-only contract tariffs across Western Europe has led to a steep decline in the growth of the region’s prepaid connections base, new data from GSMA Intelligence has revealed. Annual growth for Western European prepaid connections sunk to a historical low of 2 percent in Q1 2009, from a high of 8 percent at the end of 2007. Annual growth in the region’s contract connections has remained steady at around 10 percent over the same period.

New data from GSMA Intelligence reveals that UK market-leader Telefonica O2 increased its lead over its three largest UK competitors in Q1 2009, while fifth-placed player 3 UK took the highest share of net new additions. In this traditionally weak quarter, all five UK mobile operators saw a decline in net additions compared to the previous quarter, though only O2 UK and 3 UK grew their connections base (3 data is estimated). Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange all lost customers.

During 2006 we ran a series of reports looking into the phenomenon of multiple SIMs per user. We identified that this is a key factor that distorts metrics such as reported penetration, ARPU and minutes of use per user. Thanks to Vodafone, we now have a little more data to work with. This report shows that there appears to be a clear and simple relationship between reported market penetration and the number of SIMs per user for Western Europe, which we can use to estimate real penetration across the region.