Africa - cost of broadband

Africa: Cost of Broadband Bane of Africa - Osaikwan

The prohibitive cost of broadband in Africa, despite investments currently hitting 6.4 billion US dollars in the continent was the thrust of a paper presented by Eric Osaikwan, the Executive Secretary of African Internet Service Providers Association (AfrISPA) .

Osaikwan speaking at the ongoing Telecoms Africa conference in Cairo, Egypt on "the Impact of Fibre Optic Links on Mobile" stated that unless Africa has available and effective broadband at affordable prices which will drive growth, the continent will still be behind other developed countries. He reiterated that Africa needs optic fibre highways , if it must have broadband to aid its development.

Osaikwan who called for a massive deployment of Fibre optic links across the continent stated that it was unacceptable that if someone in America pays one dollar for broadband access, another in Africa should pay 40 times more. He also decried the situation that after 6 years of deployment, SAT 3 has less than 5% usage because of the

"closed club deal" approach to building - incumbent PPTs on Monopoly. He stated that for example in Cameroon an E1 cost $32,000 while same costs $3500 in Ghana and Nigeria . Emphasising that the people of the continent are hungry for broadband access, he disclosed that the demand for bandwidth has been increasing steadily across the continent. Giving a breakdown, Osaikwan stated that bandwidth demand rose by 19% in the 2001, 28% in 2002 and 37% in 2003. He also revealed that an incumbent telco spends US$3.2 million on satellite transmission, of which US$2.4 million is spent on routing calls within the country, with the balance spent on international calls in one of the poorest countries in Africa.

Osaikwan who stated that Africa annually loses over 500 million dollars to the practice of routing local calls internationally said it is one of the impediments to telecoms growth in Africa .

He urged that all hands must be on deck to stop the transiting of local calls through third parties , saying that as a result of this practice, making a call from Ghana to Nigeria requires the call going through Europe before reaching Nigeria, thus adding to the cost of the call. He singled out, Nigeria's Second National Carrier Globacom for its GLO-1 for West Africa project which from Nigeria is connecting to the United Kingdom.

He stated that Globacom with 2billion international voice minutes annually was in the forefront of the quest to have broadband everywhere in Africa and its fibre optic project across Africa will be up this year. He also added that Infinity Telecoms, would also join Globacom this year to launch its fibre optic cable in a move that will make bandwidth cost the lowest in the West African region. The project will start in Nigeria and expand across the rest of the continent. He called for other additional fibree optic cable projects to be speedily built across Africa in the quest to ultimately bring down cost of access across the continent.

He named some of the projects to include the "MaIN On Fibre project of Main Street Technologies. The MaIN OnE cable system serving the West Coast of Africa according to Osaikwan will interconnect countries on the Atlantic Coast from Morocco through to Angola with each other, and through Portugal to the rest of the world, pricing independent of distance. According to him, the MaIN OnE project is an open access system being enabled to provide international and internet communications capacity via direct subscription to all operators who have wholesale capacity requirements. The system is currently under development and is targeted for commissioning in 2009. The submerged cable will have a capacity of 1.28 terrabits and will connect the following 10 countries: Portugal.Morocco, Senegal, Cote 'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria (Lagos and Port Harcourt), Gabon, the DRC, Angola and South Africa. Other projects identified by him are those by TEAMS Ltd for East Africa. This project is a point to point system connecting Mombasa, Kenya and Fujairah, UAE which was proposed by Government of Kenya (GoK) in 2006. The Government of Kenya has 20% and UAE incumbent Etisalat 15%, while the remaining shareholding 65% structure is distributed among other private investors. TEAMS he disclosed , awarded a supply contract to Alcatel-Lucent in October, 2007 for $82 million to facilitate the project and increase cable capacity which is already 1.28Tbps . Other projects mentioned by Osaikwan include EASSy project of a Consortium of regional incumbent telecom operators in East Africa at the cost $265 million with a target launch date of 2009.

AfrISPA was incorporated in Mauritius in 2001 with the focus of building African Internet Infrastructure.

With increasing demand for Broadband in South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya among others , the success of all these projects will help Africa achieve maximum coverage that will reduce cost of access and ensure that Mobiles and Banks have more reliable fibre optic links within and without Africa.