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."

Pirated broadband

[derGoldstein]

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?

Local perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

From RSA...

[garatheus]

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.

Watch this space!!!

[miano]

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.

Re:Not sure it is great news

[skaaptjop]

Good point. Let's roll it all up and leave the internet in the hands of responsible people like Americans and Europeans. They do such a fantastic job with oil and those Spanish fisherman off our coastline are such a joy to see raping our natural resources in the morning light. Your idea has merit. In order to control the quality and validity of information and data that the internet connects the entire world with, why don't we simply restrict access to all those individuals whom we deem to be threat, leaving the choice juiciest IP packets to ourselves?

Re:I was at the Seacom launch party in Uganda

[Anonymous Coward]

So, given some entrepreneurial spirit, it should be perfect to launch a new ISP in Uganda. One with good customer care, good service and providers of last mile of fiber.

Perhaps something you could consider doing since you apparently have lot's of opinions on how it should be done! I am serious. Why not? Make a good business plan, gather a group of skilled engineers and at least one MBA / finance guy and find out how to get VC in Uganda.

Re:Very good news!

[__aaxwdb6741]

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.

This is only part of the equation.

[jbroom]

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.

Re:Very good news!

[bleh-of-the-huns]

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.

Re:Snip Snip Snip

[abarrow]

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.

Re:I was at the Seacom launch party in Uganda

[Weedhopper]

I learned a few years ago when I was working in Uganda that if you need reliable 'broadband' communications, you do not go through a Ugandan business. Socially, it's a dick thing to do but you're describing is what happens. You need to own your own modem and dish and your provider needs to be based outside of Uganda so when things go wrong, you can call someone who A.) knows what he's doing and B.) is accountable. That initial cost is going to hurt, but you'll be pulling your hair out a lot less. Of course, three years ago, bringing in equipment was easy and the law's probably changed to suit someone's pocketbook.

Kampala's a shark tank, but at least you can get services. I was last in Uganda late last year for the HEV outbreak around Lira. I spent four months with GPRS and bumming internet from other NGOs when I managed to get into town. 512k would've sounded good to me when I was stuck on 14k connection.