Hooking up Africa
THE VALUE of telecommunications can’t be understated. It’s now possible to make a phone call in England that’s answered by a call centre agent in India or for someone working for a company in the United States to be sitting in a cottage in the Cape winelands but still putting in a full day’s work.
The problem that’s faced both South African business and consumers is that we haven’t had sufficient bandwidth at a low enough cost to deliver those same levels of Internet efficiency that other countries can. Though that’s due to a number of factors, the one most often raised by service providers is the high cost of international bandwidth. For more consumer-focused services, where much of the content is hosted internationally, international bandwidth can comprise more than 50% of the cost of running a service.
While we’ve been promised better and cheaper bandwidth, it would appear that, after years of bickering and false starts, there’s finally light at the end of that tunnel.
The current link between SA and the rest of the world is via two submarine cables: SAT-3 (which runs up Africa’s west coast and links a number of other African countries) and SAFE (linking SA to Malaysia).
Though there are a number of contenders in the race to lay new submarine data cables, the clear leader is the privately owned Seacom, which will run down Africa’s east coast and link all those countries on its seaboard from Kenya to SA. Its importance is significant. East Africa previously had to rely on satellite communications to deliver data to the region. While satellite has served the need for voice communications, it’s too expensive and not fast enough to satisfy Africa’s growing continent-wide.
Brian Neilsen, analyst at BMI-T, says the pricing structure announced recently by Seacom shows how aggressively it intends to price access to its cable. Media reports indicate that bandwidth on Seacom’s cable will be priced at R267/Megabit/second compared to R3 500 or more on the Telkom-controlled SAT-3 and more than R200 000 for satellite connectivity. Neilsen says if those savings are passed on to consumers it will act as a catalyst for a massive broadband explosion throughout Africa.
However, for service providers wanting to use new international cables they still have to buy long-distance bandwidth from a local telecoms supplier. However – as has been the case in SA – those providers have been able to keep long distance rates high to make up for revenues lost by having to cut on international traffic.
The second cable system being planned is the East African Submarine Cable System (Eassy). Part of an initiative backed by the World Bank it has a more ambitious scope than Seacom. Driven by more developmental goals than Seacom’s purely commercial aims Eassy will run 10 000 km up Africa’s east coast and into the Red Sea and connect SA to Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan. The system will also link into a larger World Bank initiative, which will deliver a terrestrial backbone network linking a number of countries that don’t have east coast seaboards, such as Botswana, Burundi, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The third new player is the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad) and its UhuruNet cable system. The biggest of the three projects, it will stretch 45 000 km and link the east coast and west coast with a transatlantic link to Brazil.
Seacom is set to operate by mid-2009 and the other cables some time in 2010. While three different cable systems seem too many for a region that doesn’t have a massive ICT sector, for businesses and service providers the luxury of being able to choose is something they’ve been clamouring for for years.
For those service providers the need isn’t simply lower prices, although that’s still an important part of the equation. They also need the ability to run across multiple links to ensure that if a fault occurs on one of the cables’ network, traffic can be switched to another provider without their customers noticing the difference. Until now many service providers have had to use satellite as an alternative link, increasing costs.
One driver for this sudden interest in submarine cable systems is the 2010 Soccer World Cup. Part of governing body Fifa’s requirements is the ability to deliver high-definition television signals worldwide. High-definition TV requires extra bandwidth broadcasts from SA than is currently available so new cables are a necessity. Another potential driver is SA’s bid to provide a home for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a massive space telescope that would need to send an enormous amount of data to a variety of sites worldwide for analysis.
ICT plays a key role in fuelling development in Africa and if it’s to catch up with the rest of the world, cost-effective communications are a must. Being able to deliver massive amounts of bandwidth internationally – something many countries take for granted – is a crucial step in further developing Africa and will open up numerous new commercial avenues for companies doing business with or on the continent.
Finweek
Loading ...