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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."
According to TFA: "The cable was due to be launched in June but was delayed by pirate activity off the coast of Somalia."
I assume that by that they mean that the ships that lay the cable couldn't get to their destination for fear of being boarded. Can this become a new tactic for these pirates? Somehow damage the cable and then wait around for a ship to come and replace the cable segment?
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
As a resident of Kampala, Uganda I can say that this is a huge development here. East Africa is one of the last densely populated places on the planet that is entirely dependent on satellite for all data and voice communications. 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.
I for one, welcome faster Internet. Here in South Africa we're lagging so far behind the rest of the planet, its quite rediculous. I hear from my friends overseas that they're being upgraded to 50mb/s lines - usually for free as a part of their service provider upgrading their infrastructure - we're still struggling on under 1mb/s lines - and at a price that is so high (when you look at the cost of the service and the availability of income - the Internet isn't something that is cheap). Heck, even if you look at the price overseas and factor in the exchange rate, its still cheaper to access the Internet oversea's than it is here (and you get far more for your money's worth). *sigh*. If only our Government wasn't so corrupt and inefficient, maybe we wouldn't be so far behind the rest of the world.
East Africa's technological growth, particularly in Kenya and Rwanda, has been hampered by ridiculously expensive bandwidth. My university had (still has, I believe) a 2Mb/s internet connection that was shared by a faculty and student community of about 5000. It was practically unusable. Call centers in Nairobi simply couldn't stay afloat even after being given tax incentives and having low wage bills(typical monthly salary for a call center worker is $400/month). Bandwidth prices have reduced by a factor of 4 and while its not expected that they will reach levels in Europe and America any time soon as ISPs and investors recoup their investment, the immediate benefits, lower latencies and higher reliability as compared to satellite, are already being felt. The are lots of bright people with great ideas that have been held back by the high cost of internet. With the arrival of the Seacom cable and TEAMS later on, I have no doubt that East Africa will become a major player in BPO, software development and research in the years to come.