The following Case Study of Sub-Saharan Africa was put together following the "2nd IHY-Africa Workshop" 11-16 November 2007, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,
and the "Internet & Grids in Africa: An Asset for African Scientists for the Benefit of African Society", 10-12 December 2007, Montpellier, France. It contains most of the information presented plus much more background information.
Internet coverage and performance in the Sub Sahara region of Africa (see Figure 1, for the UN definition of the Sub-Sahara) is exceedingly poor. This is illustrated by the number of Internet connections per city worldwide seen in Figure 2 where it is seen that Africa stands out as almost lacking any (i.e. it is dark). Figure 3 illustrates how Africa has very little submarine cable connectivity (white lines) compared to the rest of the world.
Figure 1: UN Definition of Sub-Sahara |
Figure 2: World Internet Connection Density |
Figure 3: Submarine Cables 2007, from telegeography.com |
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There are many reasons for this poor connectivity including: electricity (see Figure 5 for the light at night for the world and compare Africa with the rest of the world), import duties, skills (see Figure 6 for a cartogram (where territories are re-sized according to the subject of interest - all cartograms shown here are from http://www.worldmapper.org/) of tertiary education spending growth), disease (Figure 7), protectionist policies, corruption (see Figure 8), conflict (see Figure 9).
Figure 5: World light at night |
Figure 6: |
Figure 7: HIV Prevalence |
Figure 8: Corruption Perception Index |
Figure 9: |
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Another way of looking at the poor situation in Africa is to look at Figure 10, illustrating the lack of Internet users in Africa compared to the rest of the world.
Figure 10a: |
Figure 10b: |
Figure 10c: |
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International capacity to African countries is mainly provided via satellite or via fibre links. Satellite links are not only much more expensive (300-1000 times) in terms of $/Mbps but they also induce long delays of over 400mseconds that result in lack of interactivity and poor performance. However in 2004 only 14 of 49 sub-Saharan countries had access to fibre according to NEPAD. In fact as seen in Figure 11:
Figure 11: Fibre links to and within Africa and the locations of universities |
Figure 12: |
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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 and the Far East for eight countries along the West Coast of the Continent. 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. 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.
The first large-scale international fibre project in sub-Saharan Africa, SAT-3/WASC's first segment connects Portugal to the Cape in South Africa reaching eight coastal countries along the way: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon and Angola. 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 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.
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.
Mike Jensen
In fact 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.
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. |
Figure 13a: 2002 |
Figure 13b: |
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Market Research conducted by Paul Budde Communications indicates that 1 year of Internet access is greater than the annual income of most Africans. Only in Egypt, Libya, and Mauritius is the annual cost of Internet access < 10% of the annual income. A study on Promoting African Research & Education Networking (PAREN), sponsored by IDRC, in Jan 2005 showed that African universities pay on average 50 times more for bandwidth than, for example, U.S. universities ($5.46/ Kbps/month vs. $0.12/Kbps/month). W. Africa pays on average $8/Kbps/month, and N Africa $0.52/Kbps/month. An OECD study on Broadband in November 2007 showed a median for OECD countries of $16/Mbps/month with Japan at $3.09/Mbps/month. Even a recent Bandwidth Initiative by a c alition of 11 African Universities (MZ, TZ, UG, GH, NG, KY) + four major US Foundations to provide satellite thru Intelsat though it reduced the costs by a factor of three they are still at $2.23K/Mbps/month. Thus Africans are paying hundreds of times what is being paid by residences in OECD countries.
Africa has close to 1 billion people or about 14% of the world's population. However, the Internet penetration shown in the table below is only about 3.6% so it is a huge potential market.
At the same time there are promises of considerably increased fibre connectivity to sub-Saharan Africa in the next two years (in particular in time for the Soccer World Cup in South Africa in 2010) as can be seen in Figure 14.
Figure 14: |
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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; micro-payments; content in many new local languages; use of wireless for last mile connections, Internet kiosks and cafes, etc.
The PingER project is arguably the most extensive active end-to-end Internet performance measurement project today. It data goes back over a decade and more recently has focused on measuring the Digital Divide. It covers measurements from over 16 countries to over 150 countries (see Figure 15) containing over 99% of the world's Internet connected population. 45 of the countries are in Africa.
Figure 15a: PingER Deployment Dec 2007, red are monitoring sites, blue beacons that are monitored from most monitoring sites and green the monitored only sites. |
Figure 15b: Google map of African sites Dec 07 |
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Information on Calculation MOS can be found at http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/tutorial.html#mos
Another way of showing how Africa is behind the rest of the world from the point of view of PingER Internet measures is to show maps of the performance of each metric for January through September 2007. These are shown in the Figures below.
Red indicates geostationary satellite |
Voice & Video de-jitter required |
Host & Network Fragility |
Data Transfer |
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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.?
Looking at the figure below of the routing from the best connected country in Sub Saharan Africa, i.e. South Africa to the rest of Africa in 2005 it is seen that aprt from to Zimbabwe and Botswana traffic was routed via other continents. Not only does this increase costs but it means that In essence the African community is subsidizing the international carriers.
What is needed is to put into place International eXchange Points (IXPs) between countries to reduce costs and improve performance. This requires users (universities, countries) to band together to leverage influence, get deals etc. There is evidence of this happening in Ubuntunetand the Bandwidth Initiative referred to above. However, current providers (cable and satellite) have a lot to loose and many of these have close links to regulators and governments (e.g. over 50% of ISPs in Africa are government controlled), so this will be difficult in many cases and may require government intervention. Also the regulatory regimes on the whole are closed and resistant to change, and
sometimes ISPs themselves are unwilling to co-operate
A survey by Les Cottrell and Monique Petitdidier at the IHY meeting Ethiopia in November 2007 of leading Universities in 17 countries showed the following:
Other examples from Heloise Emdon at the Acacia Southern Africa UNDP Global Meeting for ICT for Development, in Ottawa 10-13 July 2006 include:
Also from the Harvard African Higher Education Study:
In the industrial age a pre-requisite was an expensive infrastructure of roads, railways, ports to distribute raw materials and products, plus factories (e.g. steel making, cars etc.). In today?s information age: help, technical information is readily accessible online, so one person with a computer and an Internet connection can be productive (e.g. outsourcing of help, information services etc.) An Internet connection is a necessary pre-requisite and cheaper to install than a highway. To compete in today?s world, investment in IT and networking is critical to enable opportunity and productivity. It can also help minimize brain drain by making Africa more attractive to trained people.
It is clear that there are many Digital Divides, by region, country, within countries, age groups, city vs rural etc. How one tackles the DD varies from country to country, region to region etc. Typically we (International Committee on Future Accelerators (ICFA) / Standing Committee on Inter-regional Connectivity (SCIC)) have seen for Brazil, Romania, Pakistan and India it involves :
Maps of Connectivity from South Africa
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
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.
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
The bandwidth Initiative: Opening the power of the Internet to African Universities
University of Zambia Status.
