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East Africa Gets High-Speed Internet Access Via Undersea Cable
Abel Mebratu writes with this excerpt from the BBC: "The first undersea cable to bring high-speed internet access to East Africa has gone live. The fiber-optic cable, operated by African-owned firm Seacom, connects South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia. The firm says the cable will help to boost the prospects of the region's industry and commerce. The cable — which is 17,000km long — took two years to lay and cost more than $650m."
I currently pay about $50 a month for a connection that can burst up to 160kbps, averages at about 40kbps, and doesn't work about 30% of the time.
As another resident of Kampala, Uganda, I want to know where the you get your Internet from because that's the kind of connection I PRAY FOR EVERY NIGHT BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP.
Please excuse my rampant cynicism, but...
Where I work, we pay $1062/mo for a 256k/128k link with Datanet that's shared out to four sites (they claim we're on two bandwidth profilers and thus are getting 512/256 split between two links -- but I don't see that) which is up only 30% of the time on average -- though in all fairness the last two months have been OK.
And when I say OK, I'm only referring to the local link between us and our other sites around Kampala being stable, and not the Internet which is what we're actually paying all the money for.
It's not like we have anywhere to go, either. MTN is more expensive, Infocom is more expensive, Broadband Company doesn't yet peer at the IXP as far as I'm aware, UTL is more expensive, Africa Online is equal or more expensive, etc.
All of them do things like using private IP addresses in their public space, leave their VSAT customers modems exposed to the world with default admin/admin passwords, randomly block ports with no warning (like 25, for example), walk into the IXP and start ripping cables out in the middle of work-days with no notice, have zero customer service, charge you $1500 for a radio, try to force you to pre-pay three months before providing you service, don't give a shit when they don't provide service and you demand a refund, etc. (We've told Datanet we're post-paying and that's that, but this is not a normal procedure around here and they bitch about the fact that we do it all the time.) It took Infocom seven attempts to even get us a quote with the right items on it.
At my home I pay 245,000UGX ($120) for a 64k connection with MTN that is limited to 2GB of transfer -- when that runs out I have to "top-up" again. They don't determine my bandwidth usage at the cache, either. They determine it based on what comes in and out of my home radio. How's that fair? I'm PAYING for their VSAT link, not peered communications with other sites around Kampala (working from home, for example?) But I don't have a choice, because for what I need there's nowhere else to go short of paying double what I am now.
Furthermore, I was at the Seacom launch party yesterday at the Serena. Seacom came up and stated that they're selling bandwidth to the resellers at $50 - $150/meg depending on what you're buying (STM-1, STM-64, etc).
Yeah? Great! But then why did Infocom call me up a few days ago and tell me the "early-bird special" was $700/meg for a limited time only?
Meanwhile, when Seacom had the Ugandan ICT minister "cut the ribbon" yesterday, they asked him to "download anything he wished in order to get the fiber experience." After staring at the screen like a deer-in-headlights for a few seconds, he instructed his aide to download something for him.
This is the same guy that randomly announced that Uganda will ban ALL second-hand computers effective 2 months from today. That includes the P4's w/ 512mb ram, KB, monitor, and mouse sold for $70. These will be no more because Mr. I-don't-know-how-to-use-a-computer-ICT-minister wants to decimate half the computer industry here along with all tech related charities and re-raise the barrier to entry for this wonderful "landscape changing, poverty eliminating fiber connection." Why? He claims e-dumping, but that's obviously a bullshit cover for something else.
So while Tanzania and other countries were busy rolling out local fiber to their rural areas -- preparing for this event, we've got an ICT minister who barely knows how to use a computer and thus have nothing.
Oh, and I loved how Infocom (who provided the IT services for the event) dumped an