East Africa Gets High-Speed Internet Access Via Undersea Cable 198
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."
Re:Snip Snip Snip (Score:4, Informative)
Mod Parent Up. (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Not sure it is great news (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Very good news! (Score:4, Informative)
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 . . .
Re:$650M for a 17000km cable... (Score:3, Informative)
It must be, especially because of the distance it carries data. The rate of transfer is impacted by that 17,000 km so much that this can hardly be the cable you would find in your common datacentre. Add to that 2 years of labour costs and all the resources needed to lay the cable.
A quote from wikipedia: "Because the effect of dispersion increases with the length of the fiber, a fiber transmission system is often characterized by its bandwidth-distance product, often expressed in units of MHzÃ--km. This value is a product of bandwidth and distance because there is a trade off between the bandwidth of the signal and the distance it can be carried. For example, a common multimode fiber with bandwidth-distance product of 500 MHzÃ--km could carry a 500 MHz signal for 1 km or a 1000 MHz signal for 0.5 km." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Bandwidth-distance_product [wikipedia.org]
Re:$650M for a 17000km cable... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Very good news! (Score:3, Informative)
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 [unicef.org]
Re:Very good news! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Pirated broadband (Score:5, Informative)
Wired magazine wrote a fascinating piece called Hacker Tourist in one of their early issues that described much of this in detail. Including historical cable & society references from well over 100 years ago.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html [wired.com]
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html [wired.com] (same thing, but single page, for printing.)
Re:Good, now I can get more money from Nigeria. (Score:3, Informative)
I was at the Seacom launch party in Uganda (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Very good news! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:No magnets, no pirates, no terrorists (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Very good news! (Score:2, Informative)
Whether or not he is an idiot is irrelevant to his comment. The fact of the matter is he is correct. There is a huge problem in South Africa where people are literally cutting down high voltage and low voltage (phone) cables and selling them for scrap (and yes, many people die cutting those lines). On top of that, they do like to steal power, especially in townships where you can see ad hoc cabling running from nominal voltage transmission lines (220v60Hz) to the shacks they live in.
Stop, stop! It Hertz! (Score:3, Informative)