Inhibitors and Enablers of Mobile Data Services Use in South Africa

Hiranjali Ramburn and Jean-Paul Van Belle

Department of Information Systems, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Copyright © 2011 Hiranjali Ramburn and Jean-Paul Van Belle.This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License unported 3.0, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The uptake of advanced mobile data services in South Africa has been slow, even though it is currently the largest cellular market and has one of the most advanced mobile telecommunication industries in Africa. This apparent contradiction forms the subject of this article. It presents the findings from a survey in South Africa that looked at the adoption of a number of data services, including content services, web browsing, email, MMS, mobile games, mobile banking and mobile chats. It was found that, apart from SMS, users were indeed generally slow to adopt any of the 3G data services. The article lists and discusses the major obstacles and inhibitors to this adoption as mentioned by the respondents. It also reports on what mobile users perceived could be done to promote the adoption of mobile services. This research should, therefore, provide useful insights to researchers interested in mobile technology adoption in Africa as well as the providers of mobile data services.

Keywords: Mobile Data Service adoption, inhibitors and enablers of Mobile Data Services, Mobile Internet, South Africa
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