ICTworks by Inveneo

A few years ago, Internet access in Africa was crazy expensive. Entire projects would sink under the weight of a monthly broadband bill, often exceeding staff salaries to be the single largest expense in an ICT intervention.

Fast forward to 2010 and the ITU says that broadband Internet access prices are dropping by more than 50% globally with a special bonus for African countries:

The regional price trends highlight that while ICT prices are falling in all regions of the world, the greatest price drops occurred in Africa, where fixed broadband prices fell by over 55% and mobile cellular prices by 25%.

Despite this encouraging trend, Africa continues to stand out for its relatively high prices. Fixed broadband Internet access in particular remains prohibitively high, and, across the region as a whole, still represented almost three times the monthly average per capita income. Only one out of ten people in Africa is using the Internet.

Before you let that second paragraph depress you, realize that the ITU may need to update the way it records Internet access when mobile data subscriptions account for 99 percent of all Internet access in Kenya and mobile phones are killing the cybercafé business model.

It may be that Internet penetration is actually higher than 10% now that all that African fiber is being used by mobile subscribers vs. fixed line users. After all, Facebook usage in Africa doubled in a month in 2011, with half of its users globally accessing their favorite social network via a mobile device, not a traditional computer.

Most governments rightly see getting people online as the next step in delivering the expected economic and social benefits of IT and telecommunications. This is as true in the emerging markets as in the developed markets. The benefits of doing so are in some ways more pronounced in the emerging markets. The success story of mobiles in the emerging markets is already well known: this should soon extend to data services. Yet in the case of extending data services, there is a real danger of some serious policy mistakes.

As in developed markets, broadband strategies in emerging markets have tended to focus on investment in fibre. However this focus on fibre may miss an opportunity for a quicker and more cost-effective transformational change built on the capabilities and in particular accessibility of mobile broadband.

The early evidence suggests that mobile internet is spreading as quickly, in some emerging markets, as mobile telephony did originally. Mobile broadband use is already more extensive than realised by policymakers. By contrast, fixed internet access is stagnant.

Making Broadband Accessible For All looks at the conditions for growth in access to data services and the internet. It considers the potential for extending access beyond affluent urban users to the wider population and contains key findings for network service providers, data service businesses, governments and regulators.

If the goal is universal access to data services then the critical issue is affordability. The economic evidence to date indicates that the benefits of broadband services derive from universal access.

Several critical factors will drive affordability in emerging markets.

The first is innovation by service providers and content developers in terms of their pricing and business models. Affordability for low income users will require innovation that does not place most of the burden of access costs on the user. Regulators must enable this innovation to flourish and not inhibit it by preconceived notions of the right model or pricing.

The second is the power of content. Increased availability of Web content and services that are valued by people, and which can be viewed on prevalent devices and in local languages, will act to drive demand for access to data services to that critical point where network effects and economies of scale accelerate. Services that improve the social and economic well being – such as those that help people find jobs, sell goods, access health and education resources – could drive demand across a wide range of income levels. In addition, social networking is already emerging as an important driver of network effects in use of the internet.

The third factor is data pricing and the affordability of internet services for the mass market. The ‘calling party pays’ model and highly innovative pricing plans were essential for the spread of mobile to users who have limited ability to pay. A similarly radical and innovative model has not yet emerged in data markets, both fixed and mobile. Further innovation in data pricing is needed to enable viable delivery of access and services to low-income users. This is a complex area in any competitive market and the risk for policy makers is that policy action, or inaction, may confine access to data services to the more privileged.

Another key finding of this report is that sufficient spectrum must be made available for service providers. The regulatory challenge lies in enhancing the supply of spectrum, given that mobile broadband services will place enormous pressure on the existing spectrum capacity. Spectrum policy in many emerging markets is characterised by short term government revenue-raising objectives and these lead to policies such as ‘warehousing’ spectrum and spectrum caps. As the demand for spectrum takes off, these restrictions will become even more tempting but they will ultimately limit growth and raise costs and prices for users.

Finally, and most importantly, in order to ensure that the maximum number of people irrespective of income can benefit from the next generation network services, we believe it is vital that the policy debate in emerging markets should change quickly. The current vision dominating policy debates is one of fibre optical cable delivered to every rural community. But this glosses over many important issues, not least the comparative costs of different technologies. The political clamour for high-profile investment in fibre could ultimately prove expensive and inefficient.

The answer is not simple and it would be a mistake to conclude that there is a ‘one size fits all’ network architecture, especially if that equates to ‘fibre, fibre everywhere’. That over-simplified conclusion could lead to a serious misdirection of national resources: policymakers should remain neutral in technology choices.

The following papers are designed to articulate the challenges policy makers face when considering how to facilitate the extension of data services. We hope you find them a useful addition to the debate as we work together to shape the future of our communication infrastructure and ensure that the widest number of people in all countries have access to the invaluable resource of the web.

Closing the access gap with low-cost broadband service delivery models

Just 9.6% of the total population in Africa has access to the Internet. This is less than 1/5th and 1/6th of the rate in the Americas and Europe, respectively. But this statistic does not convey the real situation in the world’s poorest countries. Of Africa’s 48 sub-­Saharan countries, 29 (60%) have total Internet usage rates (at any speed) of less than 3%, and 15 (31%) show less than 1%. Broadband access rates are far lower still.

Thus, while wireless broadband has exploded in much of the world, as the ITU’s 2009 report points out, there remains “a dramatic broadband divide, with very few fixed broadband subscribers or mobile broadband subscriptions in Africa.”

Inveneo believes that closing the broadband gap will require new, collaborative and low-cost broadband service delivery models. Moreover, we believe that the essential components of such a model already exist; what’s needed is a well-conceived and coordinated effort to bring them together in a functioning service delivery framework.

In the Accelerating Broadband to the First Mile white paper, Inveneo and our partners are working to define and deploy a novel, locally sustainable wireless broadband delivery model, starting in Haiti.

The Inveneo­-led Haiti Rural Broadband (HRB) initiative is a collaborative program seeking to catalyze sustainable broadband access in underserved parts of Haiti. The program is founded on the idea that dramatic capital and operating cost savings can be realized through the use of ultra-low-cost wireless technologies, an emphasis on building local IT capacity to deploy and support broadband infrastructure and new approaches to cooperative network ownership and management.

HRB’s primary short-term objective is to bring affordable, reliable and sustainable broadband access to 6 regions and 20 currently un-served population centers across Haiti. The longer-term goal is to explore how the HRB model can be replicated in similarly rural and low resource areas across the developing world.

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TechCrunch has been doing a series of articles on African technology matters. While an ICTWorks commenter pointed out that a past article about the Ethiopian Telecom Monopoly had a lack of depth, it is a positive direction that a widely-read technology medium like TechCrunch is covering African technology matters (including more detailed features about Nigeria). Their recent article with an inside look at SEACOM is a good example.
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Seventeen years ago Wired published Neal Stephenson’s magisterial epic “Mother Earth Mother Board” , about the web of undersea fibre-optic cables being built to connect all of humanity. Well – almost all. Africa, again, was left behind. Until 2009, all of East Africa could only connect to the Internet over slow and hugely expensive satellite links.

Finally, two years ago, SEACOM laid a cable along the East African coast to Mumbai; then tributaries were run thousands of kilometers inland, as far as Uganda and even Rwanda; and later this year, a direct connection to Europe will be lit up. This has chopped the cost of bandwidth from US $5,000 per megabit/s per month to approximately $100, hugely increased capacity to 1.28 terabits/second, and given more than 100 million people (and counting) access to broadband Internet for the very first time. Today I visited their cable landing site in Mombasa, Kenya.

It doesn’t look like a high-tech hub. The site stands in the shadow of Fort Jesus, an ancient castle constructed by the Portuguese in 1593, and to better blend in with its UNESCO World Heritage surroundings, its outer walls are built to look like a Swahili keep:

But within are prefab buildings constructed in New Jersey (of all places) and shipped halfway around the world. The open trapdoor leads to the cable…

…which runs seven kilometres out to the branching station, and then 3,000 kilometers northeast to Mumbia, 2,000 km northwest to Egypt, and another 3,000 south to South Africa:

An observant eye can see the path the cable takes, beneath the shore below Fort Jesus:

Landing the cables is the hard part. It took three months to dig, lay, and cover those seven kilometres, using local barges and professional divers. By contrast, the cable that runs to Djibouti along the 1500 kilometres of Somalia’s wild coast was laid in less than a month … not counting the 55 days that the ship had to rest in port because of the danger of pirates.

That Djibouti branch isn’t even lit up yet. The cable is laid, and ready – but three kilometers of it that pass through Egyptian soil remain a sticking point. “Each country moves at its own pace,” sighs Mahmoud Noor, manager of the Kenyan landing station (which also double’s as the system’s backup Network Operations Center.) He won’t go into details, but I get the impression that the problem is more political than technical. When Egypt comes online, hopefully later this year, SEACOM capacity will leap upwards again, and lag times will halve. Until then, all their external traffic has to go to Mumbai, then be routed elsewhere by leased lines.

The undersea cable consists of the fibres themselves, as thin as human hairs, wrapped in a copper sheath that carries up to 10,000 DC volts to power the repeaters every 100km that keep the signals comprehensible. In depths less than kilometre, this is all sheathed in thick additional armour. Here Peter Ouko, a SEACOM engineer, displays a cutaway example of the cable:

…and here’s where it enters the New-Jersey-built prefabs after its monumental journey along the continent.

The interior is cavernous, antiseptic, and honeycombed with cables:

An outgoing sheaf of fibre connects to the next building, where customer equipment goes, and where SEACOM is installing added-value options: an exchange to route connections within Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda (and Ethiopia, when they finally connect) directly without having to wastefully forward that data to Mumbai or London first, and an IP service so that customers can connect directly to routers without having to step down from SDH themselves.

It’s a triumph of engineering, and a profoundly important one. In Kenya today, a SIM card costs less than a beer, and a minute of 2G Internet access costs only 2.5 cents. That’s still too much, but far less than in the bad old days. Once South Africa was the continent’s tech powerhouse, but now they grumble about how good the Kenyans have it - and this building is why. It and the others like it are the bedrock on which Africa’s nascent Internet revolution is built; they are, quite literally, where the future is being forged.

Mark Summer, Inveneo's Chief Innovation Officer, also leads our effort to bring needed information and communication technologies to Haiti. As part of Inveneo's contribution to the Clinton Global Initiative 2010 Annual Meeting, he wrote an article on our activities in Haiti for the Innovations Journal, a quarterly publication from MIT Press about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges.

An excerpt from The Value of Information and
Communication Technologies in Humanitarian Relief Efforts:

For many disaster response veterans, the Haiti earthquake represents a turning point in our collective thinking about the value of ICTs in humanitarian relief efforts. A range of ICT-focused initiatives have demonstrated that technology — from accessing detailed maps of the affected area, to turning simple SMS messages into life-saving systems, to establishing broadband Internet connectivity to humanitarian organizations — improves both the speed and substance of relief efforts.

The impact of these voluntary and even spontaneous initiatives was real, measurable, and widely publicized. Their success, even in the absence of any planning or coordination, hints at the true potential of ICTs to revolutionize disaster preparedness and response.

Download and read Mark's article of the play-by-play account of Inveneo’s efforts to reestablish connectivity for humanitarian organizations working in Port-au-Prince immediately after the earthquake, as well as the impact of and challenges involved in those efforts.

He explains how relationships formed through the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) proved critical to the success of these efforts, and our plans for continued collaborative efforts to bring broadband connectivity to the rest of the country, where it is critically needed.

Now if you still question the impact of ICTs or Inveneo in Haiti, then watch this video and listen to Gary Shaye, Country Director for Save the Children, explain how broadband technology does save lives: