Mobile Phone in Morocco, Mohammad Ibahrine
In 1989, the Ministry of Post and Telecommunications introduced mobile telephone in Rabat and other major cities with a total of 700 mobile phone subscribers (Kavanaugh, 1998: 59). In the late 1990s, the IAM shifted its emphasis from providing basic telephone to value-added services that include multimedia integration of voice, text, data, graphics and images. The service initially developed quite slowly, but recent reports indicated that Morocco has enjoyed one of the strongest growth periods in its number of mobile phones (NTRA, 2002; ITU, 2002). The number of mobile phone subscribers soared from 42,924 subscribers in 1997, to 3.05 million in 2000, and to 3.3 million by the end of January 2001 (NTRA, 2002). Teledensity of the mobile phone has swiftly progressed from 0.4 percent in 1998 to 16 percent in 2001, reflecting an increase of 3820 percent in 2001 (NTRA, 2002). These figures exceeded all public and private-sector estimates at the time that the second GSM licence was being awarded.
The total number of mobile phone subscribers exceeded the fixed telephone line subscribers of 4 million in August 2000. By the year 2002, it was forecasted that there would be about 6 million mobile phone subscribers in Morocco with a penetration rate of 18 percent, greater than the international average of 15 percent (NTRA, 2002). The mobile phone network now reaches more than 85 percent of the population (ICT, 2002). Many remote areas with no previous telephone services can now be reached with the mobile phone network.
Growth rates in the Moroccan mobile market have exceeded 242 percent for the last four years making the mobile market one of the fastest growing, not only in Africa and the Arab world, but also in the entire world. As the head of the Arab regional office of the International Telecommunications Union, Ibrahim Kadi, put it “the Moroccan experience has become a landmark for all other countries to follow” (McDawall, 2003: 34).
# posted by Unknown : Saturday, September 24, 2005
