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There is only one large-scale intercontinental fibre link to Sub-Saharan Africa (SAT-3/WASC/SAFE) which provides connections to Europe (via Portugal) and the Far East for eight countries (Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and Angola) along the West Coast of the Continent and south to the Cape in South Africa. A second segment, in the Indian Ocean, connects South Africa to Malaysia while passing through Mauritius and India (SAFE). Jointly funded by 36 members and spearheaded by South African Telkom which invested US$85 million for a 13 per cent stake, the project cost about US$650 million dollars. The ownership of the cable was established as a club consortium, which is a confidential shareholder agreement about which little is known (despite efforts by the South African government to release the details). The cable was expected to lead to much reduced international bandwidth costs, but so far this has not occurred due to the business models used to develop the project. Even the few countries that have access to international fibre through SAT-3 are not seeing the benefits because it is operated as a consortium where connections are charged at monopoly prices by the state owned operators which still predominate in most of Africa, and in many other developing regions. Landlocked African operators who have tried to purchase international fibre capacity directly from one of the consortium's international members have found themselves being charged as much to reach the SAT-3 landing point as they were charged to get from the landing station to Portugal. Sadly, the high costs have made it cheaper to send the traffic directly by satellite, even for SAT-3 shareholders such as Telecom Namibia, which has no landing point of its own. Except for some onward links from South Africa to its neighbours, and from Sudan to Egypt and from Senegal to Mali, the remaining 33 African countries are unconnected to the global optical backbones, and depend on the much more limited and high-cost bandwidth from satellite links.
Mike Jensen
In fact SAT-3 prices have barely come down since it began operating in 2002 and are sold at satellite prices of $4-8K/Mbps/mo even though the capacity is only 5% used. As a result the lack of fibre and lack of competition on SAT-2, international bandwidth to African countries, as seen in Figure 12 lags well behind most of the rest of the world.
It should also be pointed out that the fact there is only one fibre optic cable means the only backup is satellite which may not be configured to take the re-0reouted traffic, and in any case may have inadequate capacity.
Costs
The ATICS survey of 84 leading tertiary institutions in Africa found 850,000 students and staff with access to a total of only 100Mbps international bandwidth. By contrast, Australia?s tertiary community of 250,000 share 6Gbps of international bandwidth (although even this is still insufficient to meet their needs).
Costs
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One result and immediate cause of this is |
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One result and immediate cause of this is the cost of this are costs of Internet connections in Africa and how they relate to income (Compare Figure 13a and 13b) and affordability. For example "Currently \[2007\] prices on SAT-3 are up to US$15 000 / Mbps/month, while it is estimated to cost the consortium only about US$300/Mbps/month". From a posting by Dewayne Hendricks on Dave Farber's Iper list \-\- Bill St Arnaud. |
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At the same time there are promises of considerably increased fibre connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa in the next two years (in particular , see figure 14. In fact, four major undersea cable projects are currently engaged in a race to be the first to lay a fibre-optic link connecting the eastern seaboard of Africa to the rest of the world, with the most vicious competition centering on the connections to Europe, which is the destination for 85 per cent of international bandwidth traffic in Africa. The four projects are the East African Submarine Cable System (Eassy), Seacom, TEAMS and Reliance of India. The goal is to have these cables in place in time for the Soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010) as can be seen in Figure 14.
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GEANT has connections to EuMed in particular Marocco, Algeria, Tunisa and Egypt, see http://www.dante.net/upload/pdf/EUMED-poster.pdf . They are now working on connecting to Ubuntunet East and Ubuntunet South.
Also the UN, governments such as China, the UK, Europe, the US and companies such as AMD, Intel,Microsoft, Cisco, Nokia and Ericsson are recognizing the opportunities and needs and investing. This will introduce challenges of new development models such as more inclusive business models; bottoms-up approach; working in new regulatory, policy and poor infrastructural availability environments; working with governments and others to ensure fibres are installed with any major relevant projects (railways, roads, electricity pylons etc.); micro-payments; content in many new local languages; use of wireless for last mile connections; Internet kiosks and cafes, etc.
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PingER Metrics for Africa
For African countries the PingER metrics are shown for African countries ordered by sub region (e.g. N. Africa) and country, measured from Jan-Sep 2007 in the figure below. It is also seen how the various components contribute to the derived throughput (8 * 1460 / (Average_RTT * sqrt(loss))
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"The Human Development Index (HDI) is the measure of life expectancy, literacy, education, and standard of living for countries worldwide. It is a standard means of measuring well-being, especially child welfare. It is used to determine and indicate whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped country and also to measure the impact of economic policies on quality of life." from Wikipedia.
The figure figures below shows a map of HDI by country, the correlation between the HDI and the normalized derived PingER throughput for Mediterranean and African countries, and the PingERE throughputs per African country. The correlation is seen to be strong (R^2~0.64) in the middle figure. It is also seen that N. Africa has 10 times poorer performance than Europe, yet N. Africa is several times better than say E. Africa. E. Africa is poor, limited by its satellite access. For W. Africa there are big differences, some such as Senegal can afford SAT3 fibre while others use satellite, There is great diversity between and within regions. This is also show for the normalized derived PingER throughput for Africa in the figure to the right where one can see the overall throughput performance is poor to bad. There is a factor of 10 difference between Angola and Libya. N Africa is the best, and E Africa the worst. There are big differences within regions. In 2002, BW/capita ranged from 0.02 to over 40bps - a factor of over 1000.
Map of HDI 2007 | Throughput vs HDI for African countries, also showing population | Pinger throughput by African sub-region |
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The Corruption Perception Index (CPI) from Transparency International relates to perceptions of the degree of corruption as seen by business people and country analysts, and ranges between 10 (highly clean) and 0 (highly corrupt)) and 0 (highly corrupt). It covers 180 countries. See figure 8 for a map of its values for various countries in 2006. The correlation between the Normalized derived throughput and the CPI is shown below. The overall correlation of R^2~0.55 is good, however if one looks at the correlations for a region such as Latin America, South Asia or Africa it is very poor and negative in the case of Latin America.
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According to Mike Jensen, in 2002 ? there is almost no intra-African Internet connectivity and the vast majority of international bandwidth lands in the G8 countries - principally North America followed by Europe (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the UK). High intra-regional telecom prices have limited the establishment of links between neighbouring countries to just 5 - Gambia-Senegal, and South Africa's links to Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana. As a result increasing amounts of intra-African traffic must be transited through high cost cross-continental links.?
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- Each had tens of 1000's of students, 1000 or so staff
- Best had 2 Mbits, worst dial up 56kbpsOften access restricted to faculty
- Often access restricted to faculty
In 2006, the ATICS survey of 84 leading tertiary institutions in Africa found 850,000 students and staff with access to a total of only 100Mbps international bandwidth. By contrast, Australia?s tertiary community of 250,000 share 6Gbps of international bandwidth (although even this is still insufficient to meet their needs).
Other examples from Heloise Emdon at the Acacia Southern Africa UNDP Global Meeting for ICT for Development, in Ottawa 10-13 July 2006 include:
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An interesting way to analyze the state of internet connectivity in Africa is to look at colored maps of various metrics as seen from our monitoring node in South Africa. 
Ping Unreachability Packet Loss Min_rtt
Routing in Africa seen from SLAC
Using programs written to analyze traceroutes for different regions we have been able to generate topology maps of various regions in Africa as seen from SLAC. These maps provide a valuable insight into the various ASNs that are encountered as packets are routed from SLAC to Africa.
SLAC to West Africa SLAC to South Africa SLAC to East Africa
SLAC to Central Africa
Initiatives
GEANT has connections to EuMed in particular Marocco, Algeria, Tunisa and Egypt, see http://www.dante.net/upload/pdf/EUMED-poster.pdf . They are now working on connecting to Ubuntunet East and Ubuntunet South.
The SAT3 fibre serves some countries of Western and Southern Africa. The EASSY fibre is intended to assist Eastern Africa.
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ICT in Africa: a Status Report, Mike Jensen
West Africa Submarine cable Connection
Web Atlas of Regional Integration in West Africa
African Scientific Network
African Universities
Columbia University Africa Studies
Lowering the Cost of Internet Access in Africa
The bandwidth Initiative: Opening the power of the Internet to African Universities
University of Zambia Status.
Submarine Cables