Pyramid Research group (PYR) is a the United Kingdom based telecommunication research firm, is an economist group company that provide international market analysis and consulting services to the communications industry. A research was carried out by Pyramid Research group on ''The impact of mobile services in Nigeria'', march 16th, 2010.
The research gathering and analysis was separated into four sections. The first section talked about the mobile telecommunication industry having a positive impact in Nigeria by attracting investment and creating various commercial activities. In that section, it was found and concluded that over the past decade approximately 16 billion dollars has been invested in the telecommunication sector, and there are as many as 3 million jobs, directly and indirectly, involved with the sector. The mobile subscriptions also surpassed 72.6 million in the year 2009 accounting for over half the population at that time and further estimating the subscription to go over 128 million in the year 2014. This section also identified a problem of specific mobile database applications as limited, because end users in Nigeria value mobile services and are a frequent user of the platform. They then concluded that future development of the sector will be driven by joint effort among industries players, the local government and international organisations.
The 2nd section in the research talked about the mobile services market around the world driven by advances in the areas of access networks, devices and applications. Categorized as Wider Availability of High-Speed or Rapid Networks, Versatile and Affordable Devices, and Variety of Applications. The pyramid research (PYR) as at then forecasted that more than 55% of the world mobile subscription will be using 3G+ in 3 years to come, and also determined that the Nigerian telecom market 422000 in 2001 to 73 million at the end of 2009. The research went on stating that in the Us dollar-based revenue terms from 2001-2009, Nigerian telecom market was the second-fastest expanding market, behind South Africa in the whole of Africa. Which was a remarkable achievement?
In this section, it was also reviewed that the Nigerian telecom sector has contributed to the economy in creating jobs directly or indirectly and estimated that as many as 3 million jobs have relation to the industry. The jobs are divided into two subgroups. The top category of the indirect jobs included infrastructure development, marketing, equipment sales, public relations and advertising as well as security workers involved in the protection of based stations. It stated that Zain employed about 8000 workers as at 2008. Then at the base of the indirect jobs category, there are phone booth operators, mobile phone and service sellers, retailers, recharge card distributors and as well as vendors. What this phone booth operators simply does are making available few mobile phones in public centres for making all kinds of calls whether local, international, emergency or any other purpose known to people.
According to the pyramid research (PYR), the mobile operators are in constant evolution because virtually all the five major mobile operators in Nigeria has undergone technological migration from 2G to 2.5G and were working towards getting to 3G network service. Additionally, the telecom sector is said to have had an impact on other sectors of the economy such as the provision of urban and rural connectivity in the education, health, finance, agriculture, transport and entertainment applications.
In the 3rd section of the research, the pyramid group conducted a survey of over 1500 mobile users in Nigeria to analyse the impact of the telecom sector to their daily lives. The research included a combination of male and female participant and also designed to include all mobile users living in different part of the country with 70% living in urban areas and 30% living in the rural areas across the country. The age grade was from 16 to 69 years old of the population. Questionnaires containing mostly closed-end questions were developed. 60% of the interviewees was said to have accepted that the telecom sector has positively affected every aspect of their lives and 35% out of the 60% also claimed that the sector dramatically improved all sector of their lives. 80% of the samples saw financial gains from the improvement of the sector. All these and many more were some of the benefits that the participants in the questionnaires accepted the got from the telecom sector.
The 4th and last section of the pyramid research talked about the new types of mobile applications that the Nigerian people would like to use to make further live easier for them. Such applications like local weather news, related educational applications from government, money transfer over mobile phones, agricultural related applications and the ability to pay for transportation fee with the mobile phones. Then the research group now concluded that for the sector to continue their part in evolution, four key strategies had to be carried out.
-Organizing local players to launch programs /facilitate industry data.
-Manage programs towards self -sustainability.
-Monitor, operate and enhance the application plus gas.
-Government involvement in the promotion of the telecom sector has to increase.