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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."
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.
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.