Eighteen months after Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution marked the onset of the Arab Spring, what effect has the upheaval in the region had on the telecoms sector?

This year’s AfricaCom conference and exhibition, which was put on by Informa Telecoms & Media in Cape Town on 9-10 November, was bigger and busier than ever before, demonstrating the vibrancy and potential of Africa’s telecom market.

But the regional industry isn’t just growing – it is also beginning to undergo some potentially profound changes, as data services become ever-more important and new, non-operator players take an increasingly prominent role.

For a long time, Informa Telecoms & Media analysts have felt like lone voices in the wilderness, banging on about the potential for MVNOs in Saudi Arabia, only to be met with apparent indifference and even scorn.

Bharti will be looking to reinvent Zain Africa by introducing the low-cost business model that it has pioneered successfully in India. Bharti will also be hoping to achieve economies of scale across its Asian and African operations, which together will make it the fifth-largest mobile operator in the world. But operating in Africa does present particular challenges, some of which will be new to Bharti, despite its credentials as an emerging-market operator.

The prospects for WiMAX seemed to have dimmed somewhat in the past couple of years as a result of the strong growth of HSPA, which is often seen as a rival to WiMAX, and a recession that has reduced the appetite for the spending necessary to build networks.

Progress on the region’s big M&A deals – the prospective sale of Zain Africa or a stake in Zain; and the cash and share-swap deal between Bharti and MTN – appears to have stalled. There has been such confusion in the past few days over the possible sale of a large stake in Zain to an Indo-Malaysian consortium that it is at risk of descending into a debacle.

The telecoms market in West and Central Africa remains vibrant, but the message from last week’s West & Central Africa Com conference, organized in Abuja, Nigeria, by Informa Telecoms & Media, is that business is getting tougher for operators as a consequence of slowing growth rates, increasing competition and falling ARPUs, and the global economic slowdown.