How Africa Will 'Leapfrog' Wired Networks

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday September 3, 2013 @04:10PM from the go-ahead-and-leapfrog-social-media-too,-it's-not-worth-it dept.

umarkalim writes "In an interview with Al Jazeera, Les Cottrell at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory explains how Africa will actually 'leapfrog' the need to install hard-wired cables. He says it's often overlooked that the continent is huge and that the countries are diverse. He says, 'the cost of the infrastructure is quite high, especially if you have to connect every home with copper cables and fiber-optic cables ... I think in many cases Africa will actually "leapfrog" the need to install hard-wired cables everywhere, and will be able to use different techniques such as the BRCK modem, the low-earth orbiting satellites or the 3G solutions to get connectivity to where they need.'"

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Re:Missing wires by aXis100 · 2013-09-03 17:07 · Score: 4, Interesting

I had a mate who had a few kilometers of fibre cable deployed outside of their refinery area in africa. Unsurprisingly, some enterprising bugger would come along and dig it up, hack into it only to discover it wasn't copper. That in itself wouldnt be too bad - I mean it's not the end of the world to pull a bit of slack and splice the ends together.
Unfortunately the same would-be copper thief would then travel along the cable a few more metres and try again... and again. Just in case it changed you know?