The BBC has put together a nice, animated map showing how internet penetration has spread over the world up through 2008 (not sure why 2009 is the ugly stepchild year in all of this.) As is usual, the big blank spot on there is Africa, with the exception of Morocco, who seem to be doing pretty well, most likely due to the proximity to Spain which allows cable to be deployed quite rapidly.
Nothing on this map should come as a surprise to anyone following African technology and it's all part of the BBC's large SuperPower report they're doing on how the net is changing lives around the world. But, that said, it's not changing the lives of too many in DR Congo with the 0.45% penetration rate there that they even make special note of, although I assume that will change a good deal once their inland cable reaches Kinshasa and potentially, 10 million new users. Also on that note, not including 2009 really skews things a just a wee bit as the East African cables have changed the game a great deal on that side of the continent.
Anyways, a map worth a look is you enjoy all thingies animated.
A couple months ago, I wrote about the Central African Backbone which was in the process of being planned. More news has come along on this front and it runs a bit counter to what seemed to be the plan in my previous article. The good news in all of this is that, according to this article, the World Bank has indeed fully committed to the development loan:
The Board of the World Bank has approved total project funding of US$215 million, of which US$26.2 million will go towards the first phase of developing each country’s national backbones to give them access to the international landing station in Cameroon.
The only thing is that instead of the line running from Algeria to the south, apparently the line is going to run from the Cameroonian coast, inland to the east, in order to connect Chad and CAR. The goal being to obviously favor countries starting with the letter C as C stands for 'connectivity' or something like which I've just made up... The genius of this plan is that they expect to run the cable along an oil pipeline that terminates at the coastal town of Kribi in Cameroon. Sounds good to me if it means that people will get proper terrestrial connections in the very near future.
This recent article makes a brief mention of redundant connections, which may be where the connection up through Algeria comes in to play at some later date. The ambiguity goes a long way to explain why the CAB hasn't made as much news as it should because in reality, the coastal cables are incredibly easy in comparison to connecting up those who are further inland. Hopefully we'll get more coverage as the deployment proceeds and solidifies.
A great deal of articles have been written about all the East African cables being deployed. Rightly so, given that connectivity is paltry and slow at the moment and about to get a good deal faster (hopefully.) But while this is all good, when you read about how fast the cable is laid out in the ocean (10+km a day), you realize that it's really the inland part that's tricky and there's a lot of inland land in Africa. Sure, you don't need a boat to make it happen and the ever-present media-spawned threat of pirates is less, but the issue of cutting across fields, farms, and most importantly, international borders on land is pretty daunting.
I suppose it's because they haven't broken ground on the project yet, or probably more to the point that the majority of coverage has been in French, but the Central African Backbone is starting to gain a bit of momentum. (Please add to the Wikipedia link if you know more as I had to create it when writing this article.)
A good deal of what I know came from this article on ZDNet in French which covers the basic layout of the cable and the fact that it will most likely start in Algeria and connect to Europe to the north and Sub-Saharan Africa to the south. While there was a little bit mentioned about this last February, it's the fact that Algeria has decided to really set forth and start laying the cable that has garnered more worthwhile attention lately. Their Information Minister is pushing it in the name of getting rid of the satellite connections and helping Algerians better connect to the internet. But in reality, anyone smart knows that this is going to be a major cash cow for Algeria once they punch through to the other countries including Chad, Cameroon, and CAR. All of that comprises Phase 1 of the project and I'm not exactly sure how they're planning to connect Chad with Algeria and not be connecting Niger which lies between the two. Apparently there is a bit of a "and then a miracle occurs" aspect to the planning currently.
Phase 2 of CAB is even more in the Wild West portion of planning as a great number of countries have been tossed around in the mix to connect. While Nigeria might be there, the most probable candidates are Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, São Tomé, and Congo-Brazzaville. Congo-Kinshasa is also on the list to possibly be connected. Of course, Kinshasa could be very well have its own link very soon, so it's not quite as crucial for that area. What would be more impressive is if Northern Congo-Kin could get in on the link coming in to CAR assuming that they would naturally run any fiber link to Bangui, the capital, which sits against the border with Congo. If only Mobutu would have lived to see the day when Mad Men could be live streamed at Gbadolite...
Unlike the Globacom cable, this initiative is indeed being financed be foreigners, namely the World Bank. You can view a brief overview of the loan, here. They quote Phase 1 as being $30 million USD. The ZDNet article quotes it as being €17 million, so I don't really know which figure is for certain. Phase 2 is set to cost in the neighborhood of $160 million, so obviously due to the amount and the number of countries involved, it can be understood as to why it's so undecided at this point.
However the pieces fall, once the links start getting put in to place from Algeria, there will be a world of change for the interior of Africa which usually relies solely on VSAT connections that are obviously better than nothing, but still suck. As to speed for CAB, I couldn't find any hard figures. It is said that Cameroon will have 12 optical fibers and Chad will have six, which doesn't make a lot of sense, nor does it really say much about speed. I guess once things actually start happening over the next year, we'll get a better sense of all this.
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.
I just recently finished reading this article. It's massive. It's longer than the Wikipedia article on Michael Jackson, but of course there is a good reason for this. This article on Wired UK details more points about the internet cables that are being deployed off the coast of East Africa than any other article I have read to date.
I have to be quite honest in that the initial tone of the article is rather paternalistic at first with grand, Stanley-esque ways of explaining things such as "Somalia, the planet’s most utterly failed state". Thankfully, it gets past all of this and digs right in to the facts such as Kenyans paying $2,300 a month for a duplex satellite connection with one megabit of throughput, but 600ms of latency. This means that they're spending a helluva lot of money for a meager pipe that takes over a half a second for each single bit of data to transmit. Given that even a lean page has 50000 bytes of data that is not a fast connection whatsoever. This is one of the reasons that we're seeing such a fanfare about these new connections. They will be the first time that East Africa will be connected to an internet that more closely resembles the rest of the world and at a price that will be much, much more affordable (although not at first of course.) And with the cable transmitting at 1.28 terabits per second (or 16,800 megabytes per second if my math is correct) that should be some pretty decent throughput.
All of this is not coming cheaply. Seacom (the entity that the article mostly talks about) is investing $650 million USD in the project which goes to show why the TEAMS project isn't faring as well given that it's working with a sixth of that to lay its cable.
Teams doesn’t appear to have a website. It also doesn’t appear to have a dedicated office, telephone number, email address or anything else one might reasonably expect. But work is definitely underway.
From the history of the projects, the article then delves in to the technical elements of how cable is laid, which I really thought was just a process of dumping it on the ocean floor. It happens that it's just a tad bit more complex than that:
Deep below the waves somewhere off the coast of Africa, a bright-yellow six tonne box-shaped object, about the size of a small military tank and bristling with wires, lights and gadgetry, is trying to take hold of a submarine cable lying on the seabed. This is the Tyco Resolute’s remote operated vehicle, or ROV – and one of the coolest toys imaginable. It has rubberised tracks to drive about on the ocean floor as well as thrusters on its sides, enabling it to fly like an undersea helicopter.
Then it gets in to Kai Wulff. I would warrant that while Kenyans are probably happy to see that they're getting faster internet in the very near future, they're probably not all that thrilled that a German is going to be the one in charge of it. And Wulff doesn't mess around: "the first large-scale customer of Seacom in Kenya, having secured a 15-year 10Gbps slot on the cable for a cool $100 million." KDN (Wulff's company) is apparently also in the process of "rolling out fibre links to Kampala in Uganda, building redundant rings around Kenya, linking into Tanzania, Rwanda and other countries." meaning that in a good way, this map will need some updates.
All of this is just a snippet of the article though. If you haven't read it yet and have any interest at all in these projects, I would highly recommend taking a look; allusions to cable engineers looking like Antonio Banderas and all.
There has been a good deal of buzz around the African undersea cable map that Steve Song has been steadily creating and posted on his great blog, Many Possibilities. It's cool and you should go check it out. Erik agrees.
This is all well and good for these main cables that exist or will exist. They're a bit easier to find as they're gigantic and massive backbones to the continent. But what happens when they connect to land and the connection needs to come in to the interior? That information is harder to find and there are a lot of projects that start, stop, and often never get attention. I felt lucky to come across the info for my previous article in DR Congo.
Steve is apparently not content to rest on his laurels and created a Google Map that anyone can edit to trace the routes of the African internet landlines. If you take a look at it, it's pretty scarce on info at the moment. I mapped what I know of the DR Congo line and with your help, more lines will slowly become known.
I know that Google Maps are not terribly friendly for those on low bandwidth, but if you're in a country and you know of the terrestrial fiber lines, add them to the map. I think it's a very cool project that could really be something down the line and help those in development to know where to focus if their work absolutely must have internet or if they want to work somewhere where it needs to be fostered.
It's really unfortunate how language spheres work to separate information on the net. While it's pretty well known that there are currently three deep sea internet cables being run up the east side of Africa, it seems that very few have heard about the new cable being deployed from the Atlantic Coast through DR Congo to the capital, Kinshasa. This is a 565km route that the cable has to take and while I realize that it's not as massive a distance as the sea cables going up East Africa, this is really good news.
I found out most of the information from this article in French. The course of the cable is going to start on the coast at Muanda, bounce through Matadi and then to Kinshasa. The trench is all being dug by hand with the laborers getting paid the equivalent of USD $1 a meter. To connect this cable, it will tie in to the WACS line, although the potential 150 gigabits from that line will be dropped to a mere 3.8 megabits. I was unclear if that was for an individual connection or for the entire pipe as that would be pretty scant speed if it were the case. Once folks on this connection get word of bitorrent, you can kiss that pipe goodbye!
The deployment of this cable actually even brought out the president, Kabila II to inaugurate it. Seeing as how this is the first land internet connection being deployed in DR Congo (a nation of 2.3 million square kilometers and 66 million people), it's understandable that this would be a big occasion. But there was another reason for this in that Kabila wanted to emphatically state that the fiber was not copper and thus had no value. While that isn't completely true and it may seem like a rather ridiculous thing to have to say, Congo is notorious for "Article 15" which is a remnant leftover from Mobutu times in which he basically decreed that it was "okay to steal just a little". Probably one of the most impressive examples of this was when 75km of power lines were stolen... in one night. So, one can understand that 565km of fiber would be a tempting target for thieves.
Of course, that's the big question in all of this. It simply boils down to the fact that the Chinese government is backing the entire project as they are with a great many projects in Congo currently. Sitting at the Dambisa Moyo talk in San Francisco last Friday, you would get the feeling that the Chinese are really the good guys in all of this. They see potential development in DR Congo and are working to make it happen. The only issue in this is that I have yet to see a single, massive world power do something just because they want to help out. The US and Russia proved that point again and again. It is the case that there is a great deal of coltan in the east of DR Congo, as well as a great many other minerals. The Chinese know very well that this region (Katanga) holds one of the biggest yields of minerals in the world.
Sure, time may show that the Chinese are doing this for the good of Congo, but I don't buy Moyo's argument and I don't think that a country who is manufacturing nearly all of the world's personal electronics is going to ignore a country where one of the most crucial materials for the manufacture of said products exists in great abundance. In the meantime, I hope that the Congolese will indeed get some speedier internet, at least in part of the country. I know very well how sorely lacking it is.
