In developed economies it can be argued that further telco transformation is needed in order to create the level of efficiencies needed for an affordable general purpose networking environment and a relaxation of the rules that will allow for commercial arrangements between operators and content providers.
However, no one can argue that in many developing economies a more efficient networking environment is already in place and that there are no significant monopolistic rents in place (user costs for calls are in cents and monthly ARPUs are in single digit dollar amounts). We also see that in many cases the mobile infrastructure is under severe pressure because of the enormous popularity of those affordable services. There therefore, potentially, exists a more acceptable environment where increased investment in this infrastructure could be co-funded by, for instance, the OTT players. For them to be able to sell their rich content services they need high capacity and good quality mobile broadband networks. It is in their own interest to make sure that these investments happen. We do see some good examples of co-funded infrastructure project in Rwanda. Their Social EDU project is a multi-stakeholders partnership between Facebook, EdX, Airtel, Alcatel, Nokia and the Government of Rwanda.