Barriers to the Adoption of Mobile Data Services in South Africa

South Africa possesses one of the most advanced mobile telecommunication industries in Africa and it is currently the largest cellular market on the African continent. However, advanced mobile data services have still not entered the lives of most mobile subscribers. This paper reports on 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. We found that, apart from SMS, users were indeed generally slow to adopt the more advanced 3G data services. We list the major obstacles and inhibitors mentioned by the respondents as well as what they perceived could be done to promote the adoption of mobile services. Hopefully, this research may provide useful insights to the different stakeholders of mobile data services as well as researchers interested in mobile technology adoption in Africa.