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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; bottom-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.
Though there are currently (2007) only 3 NRENs (Kenya/KENET, Malawi/MAREN, and South Africa/TENET) in Sub-Saharan Africa, another 9 are under construction.
Finally, Africa has a very young population:
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Conclusions
- Poor performance affects data transfer, multi-media, VoIP, IT development & country performance / development.
- DD exists between regions, within regions, within countries, rural vs cities, between age groups.
- Decreasing use of satellites, expensive, but still needed for many remote countries in Africa and C. Asia.
- Last mile problems, and network fragility.
- International Exchange Points (IXPs) needed.
- Internet performance (non subjective, relatively easy/quick to measure) measured by PingER correlates strongly with economic/technical/development indices.
- Increase coverage of monitoring to understand Internet performance and validate improvements.
- Africa worst by all measures (throughput, loss, jitter, DOI, international bandwidth, users, costs etc.) and falling further behind.
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