Nairobi — Enhanced high-speed Internet is coming to East and Southern Africa as early as June 2009 by way of a new undersea fiber optic cable linking the continent to India and Europe.
Brian Herlihy, president of Seacom, the company constructing the cable, told AllAfrica how the cable will “fundamentally change” the region by reducing costs, increasing investment and, ultimately, alleviating poverty.
Seacom, a privately-funded company with 76 percent African ownership, is likely to be the first of three new major undersea cable projects linking the world to East and Southern Africa, where high costs and limited capacity have stunted local access and business development.
“When we look at the kind of personal computing devices we have here in Kenya, it's easy to see that the technology is not the bottleneck,” Herlihy said. “It's the international capacity cost.” Nearly two thirds of the expense of connecting to the Internet from East Africa is the cost of linking to distant international networks.
Herlihy said Seacom could reduce that cost by 80 percent and the overall cost of doing business by 50 percent.
“The international capacity crisis has been a deterrent to investment. Should [costs] come down, [increased bandwidth] would be a catalyst for poverty alleviation,” he added.
Because of high costs, the market for Internet products in East Africa has been relatively small. Infrastructural challenges have also long prevented large-scale investment in Internet technology.
“President [Paul] Kagame [of Rwanda] said at the Leon Sullivan Summit: ‘Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure.’ Everything we can do to improve our infrastructure – the rest will happen. It is happening both on the government side and the private side. It is not one or the other,” Herlihy said.
More cables, more access
There are currently three cable projects in the works in East Africa: Seacom; Eassy [the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System], funded by a consortium of telecommunications players and the World Bank; and Teams, a project funded by the Kenyan government to link the country to the United Arab Emirates.
"There is a lot of competition... to us it is just important to deliver the cable,” Herlihy said. “The race… is not just a race between the [three] cables… It is a race to get access to supply. China is taking the supply, India is taking the supply and you are seeing new cables throughout the world. You have to have your place in line to have your cable built. Technology is such that it wants multiple roots and multiple cables... you want diversity.
"If Teams or Eassy want to put their cable on our cable station, our policy is they will have access. We are trying to bring down the historical way of doing business, which was interfere with your competitor. We want to open up those boundaries and make this a growth market," he said.
Bringing affordable access to landlocked countries
Landlocked East African countries such as Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda are among those which stand to benefit from the Seacom cable. Herlihy said the company is working to facilitate networks into landlocked or geographically disadvantaged states in the region by working with groups within countries to help them build the infrastructure themselves.
“We are seeing the loop which is [connecting] Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya moving quite fast, and not with just one player but with multiple players, both on the government and the private side... so that Rwanda can benefit price-wise in the same way that Nairobi can benefit,” he said.
By next June the other land cables should be in place, said Herlihy, noting that some already are, including KDN (Kenya Data Networks) and Telkom Kenya, which reach into Uganda.
'Insatiable Demand'
Demand for and growth of broadband access may follow the pattern of the mobile phone boom in Africa, Herlihy said. “Even though you are starting on a very low point, if you are actually going to meet the insatiable demand of the end user the growth will be exponential. It will be huge.”
The spread of mobile phones in Africa has demonstrated the power of the market in finding creative solutions to infrastructural challenges. Mobile banking – which allows subscribers to send money through the phone network and bypass the infrastructural challenges faced by traditional banks – has at least 1.6 million subscribers in Kenya alone, according to a recent Commonwealth News and Information Service report.
But will average mobile users be able to take advantage of broadband? Herlihy is convinced they will: “Cheap international bandwidth coupled with end-user devices – be they phones, cheap computers or other means – will be consumed because all those end users would like to find out how to exploit the Internet with their devices... I don't think literacy will be a challenge. With these new devices and cheap bandwidth, information can be given in picture format, reaching users everywhere.
“Bandwidth is the trade of information, so it becomes a huge part of the poverty alleviation cycle and globalization... It almost sounds clichéd to say this, but Africa is being left out of the digital trade of information,” he said.
Rural development
While high-speed access will bring obvious benefits to the finance sector and other businesses, Herlihy says there's a “bottleneck” in how people think about the impact of Internet communications technology on development at the most basic level.
“Banks will be happy, some people with computers will use it – but many people haven't pushed themselves to think about breaking through other core economic hurdles,” he said.
“The Internet, like mobile phones, will impact rural Africa more than probably anything else. And we know that investment in infrastructure and information is something that can never be taken away.”
Herlihy said there was global enthusiasm for Africa to become a major player in agriculture but that change would not happen without real-time information. “For example, why would a farmer be growing maize versus soybeans? If they had access to information on the price of soya versus maize they would make that decision very easily. Currently they don't make [decisions] that way.”
As the technology spreads in Africa, some farmers are already capitalizing on mobile communication in the wake of the global food price crisis. The Kenyan government, concerned at high commodity prices and rising inflation, is using SMS (Short Message Service) communication with farmers to encourage food production. A widely-advertised service allows farmers to send an SMS to the Ministry of Agriculture and receive instant advice on what crop varieties to plant
“[In Kenya] you are now seeing [more affordable] devices… you can get a BlackBerry at U.S.$100, and those devices are making their way into more rural parts of Africa,” Herlihy said. “In terms of Internet access, you can utilize these very much as you utilize a computer. And this is just 2008. In the next four or five years we are going to be shocked how much technology changes. You will see these devices get to a point where they are affordable enough for real rural impact.”
Real-time health information
Business is only one sphere where low-cost, high-speed connectivity is anticipated to have a substantial impact. High-speed links are also expected to improve access to health information from abroad and between healthcare providers on the continent. Better access can lead to more cost-effective healthcare systems and even outsourcing opportunities, such as telemedicine, said Herlihy.
“Quite a lot of information out of big Boston hospitals doesn't get diagnosed at Boston anymore. It is getting diagnosed in India,” he said.
“From a cost perspective it is so much cheaper. In real time, you now have 24-hours-a-day diagnosis. So you don't have to have a doctor in. If it is in the middle of the night, you can send [the information] elsewhere in the world. This is an area where Africa could create jobs and retain health workers.”
Currently, many health workers in Africa leave their countries for better pay abroad, leaving a vacuum of skilled workers at home. Herlihy suggests that doctors and skilled health workers could work as outsourced labour in health call centers in their own countries, providing services for patients around the world.
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Increased bandwidth can also help health researchers working in Africa, he said. “Say I am a doctor coming from Boston to Zambia and I want to do field work, including testing. It's not just the testing that matters when improving health in that country. It is all about what you do with that information.
“What happens when, as a doctor, I leave Zambia and all these people I tested are left behind with no classification of the information I gathered? There is now technology where I can write reports on my phone and send it back automatically to a database in Boston, New York or wherever, where it collates automatically.”
Education
Students and teachers also stand to benefit from increased broadband access at a lower cost. Seacom will provide free Internet access to the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and subsidized access for South African universities.
“Our intent is to [provide educational access] throughout East Africa,” Herlihy said. “In Ethiopia we intend to do something similar. We provided free capacity to the government of Djibouti for a national Internet program. We are now thinking about how to bundle that for free primary and secondary education... but it has to be structured appropriately so that it is truly exploited.”
Herlihy said it was important to remember that 25 percent of Africa’s population is below the age of 25 and the real impact of this has yet to be seen. ”This age is technology savvy – they are going to find a way to get access.”
Ultimately, according to Herlihy, the impact of increased broadband access in East Africa will be tremendous: “Let's close our eyes and imagine it is 2015 and the cable came in 2009. What did it mean for the market? I think that it's a very exciting story and it is one that people have been dreaming about for a long time.”
