Nigeria has overtaken South Africa to become the continent's largest mobile market with now over 85 million subscribers, and yet market penetration stands at only around 55% in early 2011. Subscriber growth had slowed significantly during 2009, partly as a result of the global economic crisis. Much of the remaining addressable market is in the country's rural areas where network rollouts and operations are expensive. This in combination with declining ARPU levels is forcing the networks to streamline their operations and to develop new revenue streams from services such as third generation mobile broadband, mobile payments/banking, and others. At the same time the operators are rolling out national fibre backbone networks to support the ever increasing demand for bandwidth.