African ISPs Being Fleeced by the West

dipfan writes "African ISPs are forced to pay the full cost of their connections to western telcos and ISPs, rather than sharing the costs, as in the case of voice telephony: quote - "America Online doesn't spend one single cent in sending emails to Africa." The total cost of any email sent or received by an African internet user is borne entirely by the African ISPs, totaling $500m a year for the continent, according to this disturbing article by the BBC."

Comments

Its not only Africa

[dregs]

This also happens with Traffic to OZ, and I'd guess most other countries.

The bottom line, is most English content providers are in the US (like slashdot), and if you want to see it you'd better pay.

I'd guess that China and other non english countries would have the best change at getting costs equalised, as they don't need the US site to the same extent.

Re:How Did Oz Change Rates?

[newt]

The original poster is mistaken: No split happened, and Australia still pays the full cost of connectivity to the rest of the world.

That's not to say that prices haven't come down: They're a mere fraction of what they were before the Southern Cross Cable Consortium finished laying their cable. But the cost of wholesale bandwidth here is still 3 - 5 times the cost of the same amount of bandwidth in the US, because nobody in the US pays anything to see the rest of the world, whereas the whole world pays the full cost of getting to the US.

Or, putting it another way, consumers in 6 continents are subsidizing Internet access charges for the residents of North America.

A simple "Thank you" will suffice :-)

- mark
Network Engineer, Internode