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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."
Not everything in Africa is rural....
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.
If it's coiled the right way, I'm sure it will be.
Probably not. Most undersea cable is armored using metal sheathing when in shallow water and typically pumps are used to shift the sand where the cable lays so it drops into the sand and is covered by it, thereby protecting it. Your biggest concerns are large anchors from boats that ignore the "NO ANCHORING - UNDERSEA CABLE" markings on charts and people who would cut your cable where it gets to land (unless you're smart and buried it all the way to the enclosure).
Undersea pirates?
Are you telling me they have developed gills now?
I am posting to undo accidentally moderating the parent redundant. Should've been insightful. Africa is not just made up of villages in need of running water & sewerage.
My pics.
it sure can open some prosperity to the region but usually ends used mostly as spam pots and servers for evil things. I was surprised how many even internet caffees was loaded with trojans and viruses in africa. Even in 3-4* hotels. Spreading internet is fine, but just lay cable, resell and forget is not good for internet as a whole.
God's gift to chicks
Of course you are right. The point I was trying to imply is that the fact that internet coming to the villages might be very good news, it is interesting to me how this emphasizes the differences between cities and the coutryside. In the article, this last paragraph cought my eye: "But our correspondent says it is not clear whether the internet revolution will reach the villages, many of which still struggle to access reliable electricity." If there are going to be investments in infrastructure, should they not include working on that too?
It cost $11.65/foot - probably a Monster Cable.
In 2000 37.2% of Africa's inhabitants were urban and it is expected to rise to 45.3% in 2015. From the wikipedia articale on African Urbanisation.
Thats still well down on much of the rest of the world and still means 2 in 3 people are presently making a living "from the primary occupations of farming, hunting & gathering, cattle nomadism, and fishing." So GP is probably right enough in his comment about the villages . . .
With this cable, the e-mails about my unknown dead relatives leaving me money will get to me faster. I am very trustworthy, that is why I get so much money from helping to recover money.
Goody, I can make more money helping the people who desperately need my help in recovery money.
Fight Spammers!
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.
It's not a safe assumption that everyone who isn't living in a large city is a farmer or fisher.
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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.
Obviously not, I'm posting this from South Africa - Would've posted sooner but my lion got stuck behind a giraffe-pileup on the freeway.
That comment caused my parrot to fall off the poop deck in laughter whilst trying to add the wooden knobs to the Sea Monster cables, you insensitive clod!
May your sea-fairing, peg-legged ass be keel-hauled for this!...it was a good parrot, mate, and I'll miss it a lot!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
But in South Africa (which is one of the countries this cable goes to) the figure was 60% Urban population in 2007. Source: http://www.unicef.org/infobycountry/southafrica_statistics.html
Erik Dalén
Here's hoping they don't prohibit VoIP to protect national telecom monopolies, as only too many countries have done...
For interests sake, here are some photos of one of our smaller coastal cities - Note all the wild animals. We have a very healthy human/nature relationship
So now the East Africans will have the ability to be virtual pirates too!
Ahh cummon, someone had to say it ;-)
Quick geography lesson: in that "country" called Africa (where all the lions, tigers and bears live), there is this place called Nigeria, which happens to be on the left side of the map - that means West Africa, not East.
Way to sum up an entire continent of a billion people.
Whle we're indulging in stereotypes, fuck you... you ignorant American tool.
Since Sarah Palin said so!
Hi, I am Somalian prince.... ^@$%#@^ no carrier
Note: there are very few tigers in Africa. The native african tigers died out or left a very long time ago.
Nor are there bears. As an African, I'm quite aware of this. I was alluding to a Wizard of Oz quote and was just being facetious.
I live in San Jose, California. I can see Google, and other campuses from my house. I can not get High speed internet. I use a dial-up line. I am just a little bit up the hill, and the new development less than 200m down the hill all have high speed DSL, they also have comcast cable. All that does me little good, as nobody will connect me.
Maybe the telecom companies will have extra resources to connect me, now that they are finished with Africa.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
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
Afaict undersea cables aren't pure fiber. There is a fiber core which carries the actual data but there are also layers of conductors (not sure if they use copper or some other metal) to carry high voltage power to the repeaters and in shallower waters a layer of metal armoring to reduce the risk of damage.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Thinking of it, this is actually a smart move. Powering up your industrialized areas with Internet only makes those areas more productive, thereby generating more tax money which in turn can be used to help those villages.
Putting sewage, water and electricity into villages doesn't guarantee a ROI - it's just a sink-hole for money. Once you install those basic necessities they will only attract maintenance costs and shift focus away from survival and onto prospering. The people will focus more on getting their kids to school than just surviving.
All of this sounds like a good idea, yeah? But where will the money for all of this come from? The west? No. We already fucked up Africa pretty good, and we should stop interfering any more. They are more than capable of generating their own money, as witnessed by this undersea cable.
Any child who's played a strategy game knows this for a fact: Resources is the first thing you should make sure you have plenty of. Spending resources before you have them is dumb, and always results in failure.
The villagers can wait.
All the East coast of Africa has up to now been severeley lacking in possibilities of connectivity, and has had to make do with satellite links which are high latency and expensive (a DEDICATED satlink of 1Mb up and 1Mb down is in the ballpark range of around $10,000 per month, yes ten-THOUSAND per MONTH).
The West coast has had the SAT-3 cable for a while (2001), with a total capacity of 120Gbit/s (according to Wikipedia). Most of that lands and gets used up in SouthAfrica and in Nigeria. South Africa is in a decent situation because they have a country-wide distribution network that lets them hand off the network to most places. In Nigeria, however, try getting a connection on the SAT-3 outside of Lagos...
The problem throughout Africa is not only that of lack of backbone country-to-internet connectivity, but actually that of a decent distribution network within the country itself.
It's of little use to land a multi-gig cable at a certain place if then you don't have the infrastructure to re-distribute it. Maybe a chicken and egg situation... No backbone, so no point in building local distribution. No local distribution, so no point in building a backbone...
Nigeria is arguably the 2nd most developed country in Africa (After S.A.), and if you want a link outside of Lagos, your best bet is to go for a satlink. In fact, even INSIDE of Lagos, ISP's use sat-link bandwidth because of the instabilities of using Nitel to get to the SAT-3 landing station. So, if the 2nd most developed country has had a sub-link for 8 yrs and can't get the signal distributed, how long do you think it's going to take for this new cable to actually start making waves?
I'm betting it's mainly going to be used in the short term for South Africa (will drop prices for them!), and for the rest of the countries will serve to carry voice from the main hubs of the cellphone operators...
So to give an idea of how things happen in lesser developed countries:
-In Congo Democratic Republic, cellphone coverage is getting to be quite extensive (at least in the population centers), but if you make a phone call from Goma (eastern border) to the capital Kinshassa, your call goes over a satlink (no city to city connection). Even worse, if you call a friend/colleague also in Goma, but who happens to use a different operator, your call may actually make TWO hops: first sat-hop back to Kinshassa, then handed from one operator to the other, and then back over another sat-hop to Goma...
Think about it.
Not really. Fiber, not copper. It won't become a magnet.
Undersea lines of any significant length, say over 100 km, will have electrical lines inside them to power inline erbium doped fiber amplifiers.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
my comment has a citation
[citation needed]
proud caffeine whore
The fact that this link is live, will have no bearing on internet in the countryside... The problem is the local infrastructures in those remote "village" locations.
Btw, I spent 16 years in South Africa, I grew up there, there are plenty of remote areas that have no real infrastructure (that includes sewage, running water, power, telephone etc etc), and considering South Africa is probably the most advanced of the countries on the Southern African continent, who knows how much worse it is in the other countries.
That all being said, there is alot of cellular coverage across the entire continent, so its not completely cut off. The other problem of course are the local telco monopolies, Telkom in South Africa is not exactly consumer friendly.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
I worked in and around West Africa for a number of years. We waited for SAT-3 to be installed, then upgraded, and then the East Africa cables to be installed as backup. While they are somewhat vulnerable to anchors and such, keep in mind that it's a big ocean out there and the cable is pretty small. Typically the cables like this one and SAT-3 are laid far enough offshore to keep them in really deep water. Having said that, the links to the beach are probably the most at risk. The cable companies trench them in as deep as possible to try to avoid anchors and such.
The main issue with Africa data comms access is in the inside of the country. Getting to the beach is relatively easy, but after that, the African internal infrastructure is often in very sad shape. Even trenching next to a road or putting cables on poles can be a huge problem. Our biggest problem with communications into Angola was not with the offshore cable (SAT3) but with the links that connected to the landing point in Luanda. Think about what it would be like in the US or Europe if there were little or no permitting systems for digging or other construction. We multi-day cable cuts in areas that really had no backup.
Actually that's 240V 50Hz...
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Whoosh!
I don't care where on the African continent Nigeria is, because it's trivial knowledge that does me no good.
That's pretty much the attitude I'm talking about right there. Nigeria has a population of 150 million people (in the top 10) and because the only thing you learned in geography class was where Colorado and Vermont are on the map, it doesn't matter to you.
Still, you missed the point of my post. The "ignorant American" jibe wasn't just for the lack of geography knowledge, but for the idea that Africa is filled with lions, tigers, bears and 419 scammers.
The difference is, I know there are well-informed Americans as well as ignorant ones, but I'm not going to lump all of them together, even though the subtleties of my post were lost on you.