Nairobi — It is fashionable in Tanzania to speak of global village, yet, a look into Dar es Salaam, the commercial city, indicates that not many people subscribe to this village. With a ratio of about one computer per 5,000 people, and only one person in every 7,500 getting access to the internet, the "high-tech" era is yet to reshape the contours of life in Tanzania, reports Henry Omondi.

Home to approximately 1.5 million people, Dar es Salaam, or Dar, as it is popularly known, is the economic hub of Tanzania.

Illala is Dar's 3-by-4 km central business district, where major decisions in economics are made, and also, where technology in Tanzania is at its best.

It costs about Tshs 1,000 (US$ 1) for an hour of surfing the internet in majority of Illala's more than 25 internet cafés. But the statistics are worrying. One out of every 7,500 Tanzanians make use of the centres.

This small number of internet users, and the few well to do persons using credit cards, is all there is to electronic commerce in Tanzania.

According to Prof Beda Mutagahywa of the University of Dar es Salaam, "existing telecommunication policies and state monopoly [in the sector] are undermining the development of internet in Tanzania".

Speaking at a recent seminar on information communications and technology (ICT) in Dar, Prof Mutagahywa pointed out that Tanzania lacks policy, as well as legal and regulatory environment to stimulate investment in ICT development.

He also observed that "high licensing fees, high tax rates and exorbitant royalties work towards muzzling the internet."

Still, Prof Mutagahywa believes the Tanzanian situation looks good. "Dar is buzzing with technology compared with other countries on the extremes of information technology, such as Ethiopia and Libya, where independent internet connectivity is illegal," he states.

Nonetheless, the monopolistic powers of Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) have made licensing fees high.

In addition, besides the royalties to TTCL, obliged by law, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have to pay Tanzania Revenue Authority and Tanzania Communications Commission, a total of Tshs 10-20 million (US $10,000-20,000) per year.

TTCL is the only company with access to international telephone systems, which local users have to pay for.

Roselyne Nderingo, the managing director of NewAfrica.com, Tanzania's only listed website among UNESCO's top 50 sites, complains about the repressive taxation.

"You have to pay a five percent levy on all computer equipment and software in addition to the 20 percent value added tax (VAT) on all goods and services," she remarks.

Whereas neighbouring Nairobi in Kenya has about 70 ISPs, Dar has less than 30. The government requires ISPs to buy internet bandwidth from one of its licensed providers. These are Datel Tanzania, Sita, and Wilken Afsat.

For a Datel connection, it costs US$ 20,000 per month for a 512-kilo-bytes-per-second (kbps) connection. "We have squeezed our margins to bare bones," says Said Abdala, Datel's general manager.

Datel insists Telenor, the Norwegian company providing the satellite feed, charges them high.

However, if ISPs were to buy bandwidth from any US carrier instead of Datel, it would cost 30 percent less.

After buying the expensive bandwidth, getting incoming lines for dial-up access is another story altogether.

TTCL, the former government corporation in transition to private ownership, gets very low marks for its service and technology.

Its telephone network frequently goes dead. Worse still, power surges on its congested switches and lines frequently burn out the modems on computers.

Besides, it takes days to rectify technical problems on lines, and months for new phone lines to be installed.

And once installed, the lines are very noisy with electrical interference, able to only occasionally sustain at best, a 33.6 kbps connection.

Bizarrely, ISPs in Tanzania do not exchange traffic locally. To access a website hosted on another service, the traffic has to travel thousands of miles, looping though Norway or the US, before boomeranging back to a computer 50 metres away. It is the users who pay for this.

There are other things to worry about. Of Africa's roughly one million internet users, 90 percent are in South Africa.

The remaining 10 percent exist in capital cities of the other countries, where the greater the distance to the capital, the fewer the telephone lines.

Inevitably for Tanzania, this means that reaching the internet from outside Dar es Salaam translates into paying for a long distance call.

Again, all but eight of the existing ISPs are in Dar es Salaam's Illala business district, which ideally, implies that in a city with a population of about 1.5 million, each ISP is ferociously vying for the business of 10,000 subscribers. Demand is scant.

Competition has driven monthly-unlimited internet access fees down from US $180 three years ago to about US $35.

Still, the few users demand and receive extraordinary technical support, a task further complicated by much of the pirated software finding its way into the country, and cannot be fixed or upgraded easily.