Telecom infrastructure and service providers in Africa are faced with unique, regional challenges. Unlike their more developed counterparts, East Africa and West Africa have numerous socioeconomic and geopolitical barriers that have undoubtedly affected the adoption of communication services.

Several months ago, East Africa had no cable capacity. While IP capacity and connectivity has since grown tremendously via the SEACOM build out, a 17,000 km cable system supporting 1.28 Tbps of capacity, the challenge of distributing the capacity, from the cable landing station to end-users, specifically those located outside of major cities, has emerged.

Along those lines, Africa is geographically distant from the rest of the world; therefore, making the cost to deploy capacity more expensive than North America or Europe for example.

Regulatory issues and government influence/control over the telecommunication market, also pose a challenge on the continent. In Kenya, for example, while the government is promoting connectivity and supporting the use of the Internet, efforts to make these services affordable and available to the masses have had little success.

Despite the global economic downturn, Africa remains one of the fastest growing telecommunications markets. As an emerging economy, Africa is increasingly becoming the focus of investors who see a huge potential in this market.

All the talk early this year seems to be about LTE deployment to alleviate chronic Apple and other smartphones induced indigestion on the AT&T and other major Mobile Networks swamped by data traffic.

The telluric shift albeit the user will not care or should not notice is that when he or she will power on that smartphone or whatever the communicating Swiss Knife will be called, it will request an IP address to complete an IP based call. A device without an IP address will be rather difficult to reach and the ungodly NATword should not even be whispered. The comfort of the good old circuit switched network core will be gone in the LTE era.

It is rather timely, if not a bit last minute, that the Global Certification Forum (GCF), announced a LTE device certification scheme to be ready by the end of 2010.

Verizon, as far as I know, is the only mobile network Operator so far who officially announced IPv6 support in their devices and stated that “the device shall be assigned an IPv6 address whenever it attaches to the LTE network.”

Verizon’s commitment to IPv6 seems to be further underscored as ICSA, their independent conformity testing lab became the first one approved by NIST for USGv6 conformance testing. Congratulations, Verizon.

In the meantime, Telia Sonera claimed the world’s first commercial LTE deployment in Stockholm and Oslo in December. Has anyone confirmed what kind of IP addresses they are using, IPv4 and/or IPv6? They just announced the suppliers for their LTE network extension to 29 cities in Sweden and Norway. Let us hope the Nordic countries will continue to surprise us as they have done for a long time in telecommunications.

With all the LTE plans announced lately, it should not come as a surprise to see LTE as a prime discussion topic during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month. And while it will not have the starring role, IPv6 will be best supporting actor.

With the first LTE networks coming on-line later this year it will be interesting to track compliance and interoperability.

LTE should not be fragmented in too many Short Term Evolutions. The end-user community expects seamless high quality service, to them it is ancillary if is called LTE and works in IPv4 or IPv6.

This post originally appeared on CircleID.

Africa has the fastest growing telecommunications industry. But what is driving this growth? A primary driver is undersea cable build outs.

When it comes to cost, cable capacity is significantly cheaper than satellite. This regional growth is also fueled by the demand for high-speed, low latency connectivity. While satellite connections have an average of 600 millisecond delay, cable capacity delivers voice and data communications in less than half the time.

The inherent negative aspects of satellite communications fueled the launch of the SEACOM cable system, the first undersea submarine cable system that connects the African continent to Europe, Asia and India. Through this build out, Tata Communications is able to cost-effectively and efficiently provide fully integrated network services from South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya to its networks in Europe, Asia and India.

The abundance of capacity leads to the creation of a whole new industry for high-speed connectivity from call centers to growing the Internet. To that end, from August 2009 to now, Tata Communications has doubled the entire IP connectivity in Kenya, going from #3 in terms of connectivity to the #1 position.

Parts of Africa already have many attractive elements in place, including an underemployed workforce, good language skills, low labor costs and good time zone locations with European- and Middle Eastern-based companies, which could be harnessed through the proliferation of more connectivity to the rest of the world to support Call Centre, software development, and other similar services.

Carriers are examining different strategies to staff to meet the needs of an IP transition. Some carriers will be able to leverage existing in-house expertise at the data layer, while others will look outside the organization to hire a few key players to lead the transition. Some carriers will turn toward third-party providers for access to transition expertise.

However, in every model, close collaboration will multiply the effectiveness of your staff. The people in place need to be in a position to work together, not in segregated silos, to understand and develop the new skill sets they need. Cross-training between voice and data network teams, for instance, can lead to VoIP experts, who can in turn evangelize entire teams.

Even those organizations relying on third-party experts will need in-house staff knowledgeable enough to challenge assumptions around design decisions, network-based policies, or business processes in order to drive the best results.

There are a number of options now available to carriers as they make the transition into IP based networks, however it is up to each carrier to determine the models that meet their business objectives, their personnel core competencies as well as their internal system infrastructure goals in order to successfully plan and execute their transition intentions with the right staffing skills, experience and capabilities.