This article on Koranteng's Toli was a great read. Actually, in general, his blog is a great read, but this article really stuck out as it's about the fact that Ghana doesn't appear to exist in the world of Apple:
Yes, take your i-something, open the Contacts App, create a new contact and add a new address. Alternatively just try to edit an existing address. Now try to change the country field to Ghana. Note, if you will, the result: Ghana is not in the list of countries. Search under "Africa (Western)" and you'll see nary a trace of Ghana.
He goes on to talk about how it's probably just a bug and that it will be updated at some point in the near future, especially if a stink is to be raised about it. But, it begs that question as to why it's not there in the first place. It's not like the list of all 193 countries in the world is that hard to find and yes, Ghana is on that list.
I could buy the bug issue as I saw this first hand when working at a company and looking at their international shipping to see that my country, Croatia wasn't in the list. I really scanned through the list and then found it under Hrvatska, which is how you say Croatia in Croatian. But, this was the only country like that. There was no España or Deutschland in the list. I asked my manager what the deal with that was and he admitted that they had just cut and paste the list from another site. So, in this case it was abject laziness and it could be in the Apple iApp situation that the same applies because Americans and by association, American coders are often unaware that Africa is a continent and not a country, they probably just screwed up.
But then there rises the issue that Jean-Patrick Ehouman ran in to when trying to run ads on Facebook in that when you choose a country to target in their system, Côte d'Ivoire is not in the list. Oddly enough, in this instance, Ghana is in the list as well as Nigeria. But, in West Africa the following countries are not available for ad targeting on Facebook: Mali, Cameroon, Liberia, Benin, Togo, Guinea, Senegal, The Gambia, Niger, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, and Mauritania. That's a big list and I didn't even check for the rest of Africa.
So here is where you get in to a chicken and egg problem. Businesses will claim that there is no market for them in Africa. But, they are in effect creating the barriers to any kind of market developing by simple acts of non-inclusion. If Apple does some kind of Big Brother thing (which I wouldn't put past them) and looks at all the contacts that all their iPhone users have registered, they'll see none in Ghana and assume that there is no business in Ghana. The same goes for Facebook. They can easily say that they won't bother with West Africa because no one is buying ads for the region. Likewise, Google can claim that AdWords in Africa don't work because you can't register or get paid for running AdWords for most everyone on the continent.
The solution to all of this is basically for companies to stop sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to Africa. As I've said before, Google is making a good deal of headway in this department, although it's slow going. Facebook, Apple, and a great number of others still have some way to go. But just having all the countries in the world available as options would be a rather massive first step. An important second step would be to incorporate more languages. So what if you don't see any French or Spanish users on your site or for your product? Maybe if that version is made available the market will suddenly explode.
It all boils down to the fact that at some point, you gotta say screw it, roast the chicken, boil the eggs, and take a chance that in all likelihood will pay off big time.
I am typing this on a laptop that is just nearly four years old. This day and age, I can easily afford to upgrade. I mean, I could purchase a new Thinkpad (my preferred model) for as little as $450 USD, which is an amount that most any American can afford, even in this deep economic crisis that the country is in, albeit maybe spread over a couple of months' payment. Obviously, the more you spend, the fancier the laptop you get and further down the road potential upgrades might be, but that's not the point. The fact is that I could have upgraded manytimes by now, but I haven't.
There are many reasons for this, the first being that everything still works very well on this Thinkpad Z60m. I can edit video/photos fine and for web programming, it's a champ. It's still running Windows XP. I don't see it running Windows 7 though and at some point in the future, I will indeed have to upgrade, but until Windows XP user percentages drop below their current numbers by a large degree, that isn't going to happen.
But, the main reason I keep it around is waste. Andrew McConnell has a superb photo gallery up on his site about an electronics dump in Ghana, just outside of Accra. I've seen this dump and the cloud of horrid smoke that rises from it. If you had seen it and knew what it was, you would probably hang on to your electronics longer as well.
This is a big problem and it's only going to get bigger. It's one of the things that makes me truly cringe about the information age in that the leftover components are all getting dumped in countries such as those in Sub-Saharan Africa. People have few ways to fight back other than to deal with what is dumped upon their shores. And when they do fight back, suddenly, they're called pirates.
I despise the electronics industry for their constant push for people to upgrade and yes, I will bash on Apple right now as most any avid Apple enthusiast will tell me that when you have problems with the machine, that means it's time for an upgrade. An upgrade means more waste. More waste means more toxins shoved off to foreign lands on people who just have to take it and deal with the health consequences of toxin-laced groundwater and air.
For anyone who thinks that they need the latest iPod/iPhone, or laptop marvel, they should come and stay for awhile in rural areas in Africa where the trash is burned daily and you're breathing in an ungodly amount of things you'd rather not know about (mainly damnable petrochemicals.) For me, in a few months, I won't breath this anymore, but for the people here, it's constantly in the air and it's only growing more. Think the next time you buy an electronics item, stop and think if you really and truly need it. I doubt that most will heed this, as people like whatever is new and shiny, but if we can just even slow down consumption, we can buy time to deal with this growing mass of waste.
As a carbon-related side note, how much carbon waste is being generated in Africa with this Africa Carbon Forum and how much carbon will it reduce? I would like to put forth the strengths of teleconferencing, although I know that means a number of people won't get to travel business class to do it...
These things always start small enough. One twit begets another twit which then begets an official site and before you know it, a barcamp is ready to happen. Such was the case leading up to the BarCamp Africa UK which is happening November 7th in London.
Ethel Cofie started the twit about having a BarCamp Africa in the UK as to date there hasn't been one. Quickly the movement gathered a great deal of steam and a number of other people signed on as organizers: Richard Tandor, Conrad Taylor, Tony Burkson, Prince Kwadjo Ofori-Kuragu, and Julius Sowu. The best thing about this group is that in reading over the details of the event, they really and truly get what a barcamp is. They're not trying to have what is basically a conference and call it a barcamp. No, they're building up the event organically, keeping it free, and only having one keynote speaker. Of course it helps that the organizers have been to other barcamps before so they understand the format.
The organizers are mostly a group of Ghanaians and I was curious if there was a direct focus to the event, as sometimes a barcamp will have one. Ethel told me that they are much the same as other BarCamp Africa events which are to foster connections, grow ideas, and showcase success stories. They're all noble goals which is probably the reason why they've been a regular set in a lot of these events.
I'm happy to say that I'm going to be able to make it to the event as it's just a short flight for me at the moment. I can only hope that there will indeed be others from the African continent who are able to make it as well, given that the distance (and cost) is a far deal greater. However it turns out, based on the registration and sessions wiki it looks to be a pretty solid day in the center of London. I still can't get over how our social technologies allow something that starts out as a musing thought to morph in to a full fledged event in a matter of just a few weeks. Obviously, you can make it take longer if you want, but why wait when there's barcamping to be had!
I was cleaning out the memory on my phone and I came across this photo which I took with my Blackberry instead of my proper camera for some reason. These are the rails in Kumasi, Ghana just north of the train station that loop around the top of the Ketejia Market. The market expanded over the rails once the trains stopped running a few years ago. I talk more about it here, but amazingly, the rails are still in pretty good shape despite the price of shirts being debated over them daily.
So 2009 appears to be going down in the books as the Year of the Cable in Sub-Saharan Africa what with all the cable lighting up in East Africa and now the Glo-1 landing in Lagos over the weekend which will provide additional bandwidth to West African countries. Friends in Ghana were excitedly talking about this when I was there last month as it will open up a second route out of the country above and beyond the single line that they currently have which is tied in to the old SAT-3 line.
Throughput is going to start out at 640 Gbs and eventually be cranked up to 2.5 Tbs. There's been a bit of coverage on it which you can read at 27 Months, TechMasai, Vanguard, ITNewsAfrica, and This Day. I'm probably missing a lot of others as cable landings are a pretty big deal and this one is made even more so as it's being deployed primarily by Globacom Limited who are a Nigerian company.
The only thing that should probably be mentioned in all of this is that from Ghana to Senegal, the cable leapfrogs six countries (yes, I am indeed counting The Gambia in there). I'm not sure if this is because these other countries didn't want in on the connection (which colleagues in Côte d'Ivoire tell me is often the case) or if the countries were simply left out. It's a shame about this as a lot of Information Ministers are going to hobble their countries in the future if they don't have enough connectivity coming in. They'll have to run connections to neighboring countries who do have it and then pay a premium for something they should have had directly in the first place. So it goes apparently, but bandwidth is decidedly becoming a hard currency around the world and countries need to get in on it when they can.
Around five months ago, some people came together to create a messenger-style bag for the masses. Beyond just being a bag, it was to be designed with solar panels, a battery and all the circuitry to make it possible to have light at night and charge other items such as a mobile phones. Thus FLAP was born which stands for Flexible Light And Power.
Several groups have come together to make this project happen. The first is Portable Light who work to bring light and energy to people in developing nations in a sustainable and affordable manner. The second is Pop!Tech who put on a conference event each year in Massachusetts revolving around technology. The third is Timbuk2 who are based where I currently live in San Francisco and are most famous for being the makers of messenger bags as well as luggage. Lastly, there is Erik Hersman and AfriGadget. Erik was given a number of prototype bags which he took with him on his most recent trip around Africa. You can read the country specific coverage about the FLAPs here.
Erik was brought in to the fold early on because he has lived and traveled a good portion of his life in Africa. He knows the African tech scene there, covers it very well, and has great contacts. Naturally he was a great fit to show the bags to Africans and have them pick apart the good and the bad of this future product.
It was in Ghana at Maker Faire Africa where I actually saw this analysis in action. Erik had been running around Accra showing the bags to mechanics and tailors as well as some electrical engineers. While I had seen a mention of the bag on AfriGadget, it hadn't really sunk in how the whole project was shaping up. Once I saw it in person, I was intrigued.
While we at Maneno aren't able to travel around Africa as much as Erik right now, it just happened that Elia was heading own to Highway Africa where she is right now. The technology and production side of the bags had been covered very well with Erik's travels, so why not get the opinion of 700 African journalists who are at the conference? They are people who are quite mobile and depend on having their phones powered everywhere they go. After some a trip to Timbuk2 and a tutorial, Elia and a new bag were off to South Africa.
I have to say that I'm a rather large fan of Timbuk2. I think I have four or so of their bags which serve various purposes. They're extremely well designed bags for running around and my main one has been to three continents over four years and still looks pretty much brand new (seen here in Belgrade, Serbia.)
But here's the thing, these FLAP bags are not your typical Timbuk2 bag.
As you can see in the above image the flap where the solar panels are is actual detachable and can be swapped out for a non-solar flap. If you can see it in that shot, the bag is a different shape than a standard Timbuk2 messenger bag as well without the flared bottom.
The bags are outfitted with a large dose of circuitry. In the above shot you can see the board that houses the power processor as well as the battery. AfriGadget has it from the other side. The large red button is for turning the LED for the lantern portion on and off.
And that is the lantern portion. This is the reason that the flap detaches so that you can hang it from something in order to have a proper light to work or read by at night.
And these folks are Jordan and Lizzy who helped us get up to speed on the bag and gave us a tour around the factory in the Mission District of San Francisco which admittedly looks a great deal different than when seeing it during their 20th anniversary party.
So keep in mind that I am not the target market for this bag. In fact initially, no one in the US or Europe is seen as the target market. It's being designed for people where electricity and light are an issue. This struck me as a bit strange. Given the large green movements in both these regions, I would think that there would be any number of people who would be happy to have the ability to charge their phone or whatever else on-the-go. Also, the light option is something that could be quite handy during camping or again, if you wanted to be green and use a light at night that was charged by the sun. I suppose we'll see where things go with this, but given the fact that all the electronics are currently made in the US, I would gladly buy one of these if they kept this up because I am a big fan of buying locally. Of course this premium apparently makes the cost production $60 more and they're looking to produce the electronics in Asia eventually in order to get to the target price of $30 or so.
Otherwise, the bag is impressive in how simple it is. I would suggest making it even simpler though. Getting rid of the other flap and permanently attaching the solar flap to the bag would go a long way to reduce cost as well as the complication of pulling the lantern out and setting it up for use, which is a lot of steps. I would say that having a way to stand up the reflective portion of the flap up and setting it somewhere would be a lot more convenient.
The solar panels are quite cool. As you might notice when looking at the AfriGadget bags versus the one we got, there are two panels instead of the one in order to produce more power. You would think that this adds to the stiffness and overall inflexibility to the bag, but it doesn't. The panels bend a great deal and are able to curve with the bag quite well.
As for the electronics, I'm not sure if it's a matter of how this prototype was put up (they are still working on heavy design iterations for these) but the board was very tricky to get in and out of the pouch. It would be nice to see that easier to work with as I'm sure replacing the board or the battery somewhere along the course of ownership will happen.
Also as it currently sits, you can only use the USB charging port if you have the bag in the sun and are powering the panels. This is done to maintain the battery so that there is power for the LED light at night. While this is okay, I don't feel that it's ideal because if an owner of the bag wants to drain the battery to power their mobile then that's their business. In fact, a lot of mobiles already have a light built in to them so people end up using that as a "lantern" at night. This is just me talking though. I'm not sure how this plays out for those who don't have light at night.
I think the only thing that really, really is a big problem currently is bag closure. All of my other Timbuk2 bags have a set of velcro straps as well as buckles on the flap allowing you to really latch it down. This prototype had neither and while the solar panels bend, they still are somewhat rigid and so the flap would stick straight out, begging any would be thieves to have a look at the contents making charging a mobile phone in there a non-issue as you won't have it anymore. The workaround for now was to use a carabiner to snap two loops together on the flap and the body. Seems to have done the trick.
It's going to be interesting to see where this project goes and I was happy to get a glimpse of it at this stage. I believe it will also be making an appearance at Pop!Tech as well in a more finished form. Also, keep an eye on AfriGadget as well as Elia's blog to read more updates and super cool African redesigns of the bag like these.
You know the bit from that James Bond film where he kills the Russian? It's not really important which film, because for a vast chunk of the series, the Russians were the go-to bad guys. You could always count on some American actor to snarl out some badly pronounced Slavic and you would know that yes, that was your bad guy for the film. And it doesn't stop with Bond. Russians were the potential baddies in any number of films produced during the Cold War period.
I'm not sure if it's part of a larger trend, but it appears that film producers are gladly turning to Nigerians to fill that role of eternal evil. I bring this up because of a number of factors. The first is that I've recently returned from Ghana where it seems to a number of people, Nigerians are always criminals. Sometimes this is meant in a heavily joking way and more of a friendly rivalry which I assume is due to their somewhat shared history and lingua franca. Other times, with people more ignorant, it can be meant quite seriously. Of course, I found out that this attitude is often prevalent across a great deal of Africa when it comes to Nigeria, who seem to be scorned much like Albanians in Europe.
But, this isn't my business. People will have the opinions that people will have of one another. My issue is with film. On one of my many recent flights, I watched, X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Not an amazing film overall, but pretty good. Yet one bit stuck out where this early team of mutants went to Lagos to rough up some kind of diamond operation. Naturally this was a group of Nigerian thugs armed to the teeth who were soundly defeated.
Not a tremendous deal by itself, but something to note as then I watched District 9 last week. It's quite a good film really and one of the better science fiction films I've seen in a long time, although it does digress in to a shoot out action movie towards the end. But it's here where we really see Nigerians painted in such an extremely bad light that it's hard to ignore, although some (I'm assuming Nigerians) figure that they've done a great deal to earn this scorn. It stems from the fact that these Nigerian thugs run an inter species prostitution ring, trade in stolen goods, practice voodoo, kill, and do any number of less-than-amazing activities.
Naturally this spurned a great many blog posts on the subject such as District 9 is racist and Is District 9 racist?. I don't want to get in to that whole debate even though I thought the depictions were quite over the top no matter which country would have been involved. But what it does do is form a rather disturbing trend of showing one people in a continuously bad light. And beyond the fact that this is rather ignorant, it has the added issue with the fact that while white people can often distinguish Russians from other white people, white people cannot distinguish Africans from other Africans. So, while it may just be singling out Nigerians as evildoers, it makes it appear to the whites outside of Africa as if this unidentifiable African is a primitive person not to be trusted. This is dangerous on any scale and quite sad to see that we're really nowhere near overcoming this depiction of Africans.
But that's the one thing that's really been strange to me with District 9 (as Wolverine was Hollywood fare and not much can be expected of them in overcoming easy stereotypes) is that the director, Neill Blomkamp, is South African. Yes, he is a white South African, but still he is from there and that being the case, for him to make any kind of negative or generalizing statement about black Africans is quite a precarious position for him to take publicly no matter what he may think privately. As it is strange that the Nigerians are not speaking Igbo, Yoruba, or Hausa (big languages in Nigeria), but it appears they are speaking some bizarre version of Swahili as noted on a comment on this article (which was rightly unhappy with certain elements of the film). So, why were they not just the "thugs"? Why were they Nigerians speaking an East African language? Maybe this was some kind of a terse joke that some people got, although most Nigerians seem none too pleased about it.
In closing, keep an eye on how Nigerians are portrayed and note that while it's fine to show someone from a country as being bad, you also need to show others from that country as being good as those are usually the people that are the biggest part of a society.
Now that I'm back home after a lengthy time away, I caught up on getting the photos I took while in Ghana, online. Often, we upload photos to our flickr account but these were uploaded to my personal site, where I generally upload trip photos. All of them are under the Ghana Gallery with the exception of photos from Maker Faire Africa which are all in the Maker Faire Africa set.
My photos from here are generally "okay" at best. There wasn't a lot of sun to add any dramatic shadows to subjects and I was just getting the hang of a borrowed lens. On top of all that, I was rather timid in how I approached taking photos as I didn't know what the generally attitude of people would be to my taking pictures. Turns out people don't mind and so the shots from when I got back to Accra were a good deal better.
It's an interesting town with a lot of history and a very, very compact city center that is flooded with markets. I suppose I was a bit overwhelmed, but I did manage to get off a few decent shots here, although they were mainly of market settings as that was where I spent more of my time. Again, the sunlight wasn't terribly complacent in getting off the best shots and so I feel like a great deal of them were flat.
I didn't really even mean for this gallery to happen, but I got a lift from Kumasi back to Accra and it's a pretty long ride. I ended up taking a lot of shots of the back of taxi windows where the often have funny messages, although usually they're religious in nature. But, a fun glimpse of driving around if one is interested in seeing the fun side of taxis. Florian writes more about the phenomena.
By far and away my best gallery from the trip. Cape Coast is quite picturesque with a decently long history as a town that you can easily see around you. The structures left over from the Colonial days along with the amount of color in the town lend to good photos. On top of that, there is typically a mist near the edge of the town from the ocean that creates interesting shots, especially when the sun breaks through later in the day.
On a side note, I learned that under no circumstances should you take a picture of the Mighty Victory hotel that is next to Fort Victoria. I did that and a woman who I assume was the owner came running out and yelled at me how it was private property and gave me a line about, "People don't like having their pictures taken here." Based on her accent, she sounded much more American than Ghanaian which would explain the whole "private property" and general asshole attitude that went counter to every single other Ghanaian I met on the trip. That in combination with the fact that two separate locals told me, "Mighty Victory? They are not kind people there." made me extremely happy to have not stayed there and I recommend for everyone else to avoid it no matter how much your taxi driver might try to push it on you.
I had a great time in Ghana, but unfortunately the photos don't showcase that as well as I'd like. I suppose it's because I've taken tens of thousands of photos and I'm getting really picky about how they turn out. It's also the case that I was in Ghana in what is considered "winter" there, so I didn't get as much sun as would have made better pictures. On the bright side, it was quite cool and enjoyable though, which given how badly I can overheat, was probably a good thing.
Like most things encountered by unsuspecting foreigners in Ghana, the high quality offerings at Busy Internet in Accra are quite impressive. It sits on the main Ring Road just a bit east of Kwame Nkrumah Circle. This is a large, modern building with every service imaginable for those who choose the geeky path in life to those who just need to check their email. Even nefarious taxi drivers know where this place is.
Started in 2001, Busy Internet was created to provide faster internet to the masses. It opened with about 100 computers to use in an internet cafe manner and evolved in to an incubator housing the offices of Ghanaian startups. The incubator aspect has faded away though as many of the original companies that started there have moved on to their own premises. In their place, a lot of groups rent space at the office to run their operations. Additionally, Busy Internet functions as an ISP in Ghana and I'm told that they provide much better service than Vodaphone, the lovely country monopoly most people have to turn to for internet.
With secretarial services and copy machines available, Busy Internet is basically The place in Accra to meet, socialize and network if you're the least bit invested in the tech scene there. I saw great proof of this as the place is packed all day long with folks working on a wide variety of projects like the Busy Lab. Of course, with the discovery of oil this year at Takoradi, they seem to be providing a lot of services outside Accra as well.
Overall, quite cool and it blows away a great many internet cafe/incubator/networking spots I've seen in cities the likes of Barcelona and San Francisco.
One group that calls Busy home is Internet Research. I met these guys previously, but actually had a chance to sit down for awhile and chat with Worlali Senyo and Charles Amega-Selorm about what it is they do.
The company started in 2001 and moved to Busy in 2006. In a nutshell, they provide research and consulting about IT intelligence for all of Ghana as well as a great deal of West Africa. They've consulted for OSI, TIER (a UC Berkeley project), Balancing Act, and The World Bank to name a few. They also work as the secretary to the Ghana ISP Association which is comprised of 23 of the 40 total ISPs in Ghana. They are working on getting the other 17 in to the fold.
But beyond all the general work that they do, they are working for that whole "down the road thing". For instance, they're trying to get a Google cache server set up at the Internet Exchange in town, which happens to be the AITI Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence where Maker Faire Africa was held. This cache server would be a massive change to how internet traffic shapes up in Ghana as apparently (and I'm only quoting these guys on this) 80% of all of Ghana's outbound traffic is going to YouTube. With a cache, you could drastically reduce that and open up bandwidth for more... well, useful things.
Overall though, when it comes to a group like Internet Research, I have to say that I'm thrilled they exist. There are far, far too many foreigners going in to Africa to "assess this situation", which is ridiculous when there are local groups like these guys already there, who know the region, know the languages, and have a vested interest in seeing things change. I find this to be a much more effective way to run operations than having some result of nepotism come in to a country for two weeks, look around and say, "Yes, yes, they need more bandwidth here." and then leave. That person isn't going to push for a local IX, whereas these guys will and that is something we should all get behind. Great to meet this crew and see the premises on my last day in Ghana.
Given the focus of what I'm doing in the coding of Maneno, I am very concerned as the state of bandwidth and availability of internet in African countries. While traveling through through Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi, I got a decent taste of the speed and reliability. I have to say that overall, it is quite good. In the internet cafes, the speed worked out to somewhere around 256 up and 1.5 down. The down was faster at various times, but the up was never much more than 256 as far as I could note.
The only noticeable problem was what I call the "bog effect". I'm not sure if it was the line or the number of users online at a certain time, but everything would be chirping along fine and it would be like a bucket of cold water was dumped on the connection as everything would suddenly time out. Thirty or so seconds later, everything would come back up and be fine. It's more of annoyance than it is an actual impediment and I even have this happen every so often on my home connection in the US.
As stated earlier, there is much more of a latency problem than there is a bandwidth problem. Even when you go farther in to the interior in a place like Kumasi, the speeds are the same as they are on the coast where the cable touches down. Of course, outside of the major towns and cities, connectivity drops off massively. However when inside the towns, the only real barrier to widespread internet access is cost. While paying $0.65 USD an hour to use an internet cafe is quite cheap for me, someone who earns maybe $20 USD a day is going to have a hard time being online. The only free connection I've encountered was at Smoothy's in Accra (where the Ghana blogging meetup is) but you'll need to have your own laptop to make that happen.
It needs to be noted that when there is a direct correlation between distance from the Atlantic, speed, and cost. For instance, I was told that in a town like Tamale, which is about 2/3 of the way up north, speeds are massively slower and massively more expensive for that slow speed. The issue being that "lovely" Vodaphone bought out the original company phone system of Ghana Telecom and has a monopoly. The backbone of cable running inland gets more and more narrow the further north you go and they have no interest in expanding it.
But in contrast, a town like Takoradi, which is near the western edge of the country on the coast, there are some of the best connections in the country. Why? Oil was discovered there this year and so countless foreign companies are setting up shop to tap in to it. They want to have network access and so bandwidth is getting a huge bump there currently. I heard this from some of the "gang" I met up with in Accra who often find themselves zipping out there for a day to work on support issues and the amount of trips they are making is only increasing.
Home connections are a different issue altogether. Very, very few people have them. The cost is exorbitant and with Vodaphone having bought out the state telecom a short while ago, there has been little care as to whether people can actually afford this or not. The other problem is that the bandwidth is nowhere near as good as for business connections. In fact, from everyone I've talked to who has it, it's insanely slow. It only picks up speed between 02:00 and 05:30. Those who really want to do all their hardcore internet work often stay up until then to do it. Needless to say, the geeks of Ghana are a young group.
In general though, Ghana is in pretty good shape for connectivity and bandwidth even though apparently 70% of it is hogged up by video sharing sited like YouTube (according to some fellows I met in the Busy Internet building.) The only big problems I've encountered were ones like last Saturday where apparently the entire link for the country went down and while connectivity within Ghana was fine, anything outside was impossible. That's obviously going to be an issue when you only have one link with the rest of the world. Just another argument for developers to someday host their local sites locally.
