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Africa: ICT Access Updates
AfricaFocus Bulletin
Oct 27, 2009 (091027)
(Reposted from sources cited below)
Editor's Note
"Tanzania Telecommunication Company Ltd customers will from this
month enjoy a 50 per cent cut in Internet charges, making Tanzania
the first East African country to lower Internet charges. TTCL
chief executive officer Said Amour Said, told The East African that
the lowering of charges follows the firm's connecting to the Seacom
submarine fibre optic cable." - Balancing Act Africa News Update
While Africa still lags behind other continents in Internet
connectivity, particularly with respect to broadband, the next few
years are likely to see significant changes as new fibre optic
cables come on-line, wireless internet beings to converge with
expanding mobile phone capabilities, and the rapid expansion of
mobile phone usage continues.
This AfricaFocus Bulletin, not sent out by e-mail but available on
the web, contains updates on expanded Internet access in Tanzania
and Botswana and new opportunities from the Google Earth Outreach
program in Africa, as well as brief excerpts from a press release
and the executive summary of the newly released UNCTAD Information
Economy Report 2009.
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on information and
communications technology issues, and a custom search of
recommended websites, visit http://www.africafocus.org/ictexp.php
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin, sent out by e-mail today, contains
excerpts from a new report on the potential for off-grid charging
solutions for the almost 500,000 mobile phone users who lack access
to electricity to charge their phones. See http://www.africafocus.org/docs09/gpm0910.php
++++++++++++++++++++++end editor's note+++++++++++++++++++++++
Balancing Act News Update
http://www.balancingact-africa.com
Issue no 477
23rd Oct 2009
Tanzania First to Lower Internet Rates
Tanzania Telecommunication Company Ltd customers will from this
month enjoy a 50 per cent cut in Internet charges, making Tanzania
the first East African country to lower Internet charges. TTCL
chief executive officer Said Amour Said, told The East African that
the lowering of charges follows the firm's connecting to the Seacom
submarine fibre optic cable.
"TTCL has reduced its Internet prices effective from October 1, in
order to pass on this cost saving benefit to the end users, and the
high customer expectations of reduced costs on Internet services
have finally been met," he said.
The new prices will see high volume Internet users including banks,
large businesses and corporations, government agencies and other
institutions enjoying a substantial Internet bandwidth cost
reduction as customers will get the same capacity of bandwidth at
a third the current prices.
Under the new structure, a client who buys 1Mbps of Internet
capacity for Tsh9.2 million ($7,000) will now buy the same capacity
for just Tsh3.14 million ($2,415). For small and medium businesses
like cyber cafes, the price has been slashed by 50 per cent.
According to Mr Said, customers who were buying 5GB for $200
(Tsh200,000) will now buy 10GB for the same amount of money, and
that all Internet subscribers in this category would continue to
get high speed of up to 4Mbps through their TTCL fixed lines.
According to the new tariff, non-commercial ordinary clients will
enjoy a new package with unlimited use for a monthly price of
Tsh45,000 ($ 43) with a speed of up to 256Kbps.
"It is an ideal service mostly for the common man because it is
affordable and guarantees continuous usage," explained Said.
(Source: The East African)
BTC Reserves Millions for Botsgate and reduces prices by 40%
Botswana Telecommunications Corporation (BTC) has committed close
to US$5 million (approximately P35 million) over the next three
years to the enhancement of the country's Internet backbone,
Botsgate. The money will be channelled towards the improvement of
network performance and to building capacity in order to allow for
more services.
The Head of Wholesale Division at BTC, Duncan Pie, revealed this at
a recent cocktail party hosted for customers at which he also spoke
about the parastatal's 40 percent price reduction for Internet
bandwidth. The reduction comes as a result of recent changes in the
South African regulatory framework which have had a major impact on
the cost of Internet bandwidth in Botswana.
"The regulatory permutation has created favourable economies of
scale for BTC and this cost benefit is being passed on to our
customers," a statement from BTC has said. The Group general
manager commercial, Loic Descamps, said they found it important to
seek alternative leased capacity to make the service more
affordable while anticipating their undersea capacity. "Over the
past 24 months, we have had two major price reductions, one in
October 2007 and the other in September 2009," Descamps said.
Botsgate is the only Internet Access Provider in Botswana with
international connectivity to multiple STM 1 submarine fibre optic
cables. It provides Internet to major service providers in
Botswana, Orange, Mascom and the Zambian telecommunications giant
Zamtel. (Source: Mmegi)
Google Earth Outreach in Africa
Monday, October 26, 2009
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com / http://tinyurl.com/yhrvf36
Posted by Karin Tuxen-Bettman and Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach
We are proud to announce that as of today, the Google Earth
Outreach Program is available in Africa, making it possible for
local NGOs and other public benefit organizations to take advantage
of Google Earth Pro software grants and other opportunities.
In addition to the launch of the program itself, several amazing
examples (listed below) of non-profit organizations' efforts to
visualize their work in Africa with Google Earth and tell their
stories to the world are now available.
Save the Elephants takes you to Mali and shows you their effort to
protect the last of the Mali Desert Elephants. This Google Earth
project uses KML touring, a feature in Google Earth 5.0 and above,
which enables non-profit and other public benefit groups to tell
their story with a narrated tour. Your narrator on this Google
Earth journey is Dr. Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Founder of Save the
Elephants in Samburu, Kenya. This is also the next tour in the
'Changing Climate in Google Earth' series in the lead-up to the
Copenhagen climate summit in December. Download the tour here, or
view it at http://www.google.com/cop15.
The Mapping Africa's Protected Areas Project, or MAPA, has done
just that: mapped Africa's parks and reserves in Southern and East
Africa. See rich content including park boundaries, GPS tracks,
images, and more, as this project makes available for the first
time valuable data of land and wildlife in protected areas in
Africa. Download the MAPA Google Earth file to begin exploring!
[See http://www.mapaproject.org]
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has done it again:
with the release of their new Uganda Atlas of Our Changing
Environment, they have mapped areas of drastic environmental change
using historical imagery for 11 sites in Uganda. See the change for
yourself in Google Earth, by opening Google Earth, turning on the
"UNEP: Atlas of Our Changing Environment" layer in the the Layers
panel, and zooming into Uganda to click on some of the placemarks.
They have also created narrated Google Earth tours for four
locations of environmental change: the City of Kampala, Mabira
Forest Reserve, Mount Elgon, and the Mau Complex.
[See http://www.grida.no/publications/the-uganda-atlas]
Use these examples to get inspired, and to get ideas for what your
organization can do! If you are an African NGO or other public
benefit organization, visit http://earth.google.com/outreach/africa.html to learn more, apply
for a Google Earth Pro software grant, and get training materials
on various Google Geo products.
Report warns of widening broadband divide but sees strong mobile
phone growth despite economic crisis
UNCTAD/PRESS/PR/2009/055 = 22/10/09
[Excerpts: for full press release and to download report see
http://www.unctad.org/Templates/webflyer.asp?docid=12271&intItemI
D=1528&lang=1]
For more information, please contact:
UNCTAD Communications and Information Unit
T: +41 22 917 5828
E: [email protected]
Web: http://www.unctad.org/press
Geneva, 22 October 2009 - Greater efforts are needed to narrow the
broadband divide, UNCTAD says in its Information Economy Report
2009: Trends and Outlook in Turbulent Times . The rapid spread of
information and communication technologies (ICTs) around the world,
especially mobile phones, is beating the expectations of most
experts. Mobile telecommunications also appear to be weathering the
crisis relatively well. But there is a widening gap between the
developed and developing worlds in the availability of broadband
Internet. A person in a developed country is 8 times more likely to
be a broadband user than someone in a developing country.
Digital inequality is shrinking, but gap varies by type of ICT
While fixed telephone subscriptions are now in slight decline,
mobile and Internet use continues to expand rapidly in most
countries and regions.
Comparing the diffusion of the different ICTs with the distribution
of income in the world shows that mobile telephony has become the
most equitably distributed ICT. At the end of 2008, there were
about 4 billion mobile subscriptions worldwide. In many developed,
developing and transition economies, mobile penetration now exceeds
100 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. The penetration level in
developing countries is now eight times higher than what it was at
the turn of the century. The least developed countries raised their
mobile penetration from 2 per 100 inhabitants in 2003 to 20 in
2008. According to the new UNCTAD report, between 2003 and 2008,
the most dynamic economies in terms of increased mobile penetration
were Montenegro, Qatar, Bahrain, and the Maldives, a least
developed country (LDC) .
In the case of Internet use, more than half of the developed world
population is now online, compared to only 15% in developing
countries. The greatest improvements in Internet penetration since
2003 were achieved in Andorra, Argentina, Latvia, and Colombia.
The digital divide is particularly pronounced in the case of
broadband. For example, Australia, a country with 21 million
inhabitants, has more broadband subscribers than the whole of
Africa. Average penetration in developed countries was more than
eight times higher than in developing countries. Moreover, a person
in a developed country is on average 200 times more likely than
someone in a least developed country to enjoy high-speed access to
the Internet.
"There is still a long way to go before we can claim to have
significantly narrowed the "digital divide" to achieve an
information society for all. Wide gaps in ICT infrastructure
remain, not least in the case of broadband networks," UN
Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon says in the preface to the report.
The broadband divide is aggravated by smaller bandwidths and higher
costs in developing than in developed economies. However, the
fastest growing broadband markets are found in large emerging
economies. China has already emerged as the world s single largest
broadband market, followed by the United States. During the period
2003-2008, the Nordic countries achieved the highest growth in
fixed broadband penetration. The fact that no developing or
transition economy reached the top 20 list is a vivid illustration
of the widening gap in this area.
How to narrow the broadband divide?
Improved broadband connectivity can help to achieve various
economic and social development objectives, and governments play a
critical role by setting the terms for broadband roll-out. The
UNCTAD report suggests, for example, that operators should be
encouraged to share backbone infrastructure to avoid duplicative
and fragmented low bandwidth networks. To ensure sufficient supply
at reasonable prices, governments also need to ensure that
operators are exposed to competition. To achieve more widespread
deployment of broadband backbones and access networks in remote and
sparsely populated areas, governments can make use of universal
access service funds and can promote the establishment of public
Internet access points or telecentres.
For international broadband access, countries have to connect with
undersea cable projects and, for landlocked countries, build out
fibre links to submarine cable landing stations in other countries.
One region that has been largely excluded from the mesh of undersea
fibre optic cables is sub-Saharan Africa, which has the world s
lowest level of international Internet bandwidth per capita. As of
mid 2009, there were only two intra-continental undersea cables to
this region: SAT-3 (running up the African west coast) and SEACOM
(since July 2009 linking East African countries with Europe and
India). Several other initiatives are under way, however.
Mixed impacts of economic crisis
Mobile telecommunications in developing countries stand a good
chance of weathering the current economic turbulence. For example,
well into 2009, subscriber growth remained strong in the two
largest developing-country mobile markets. During the first seven
months of 2009, India registered almost 100 million new wireless
subscriptions. Mobile devices are increasingly replacing fixed
lines for voice communications in developing nations. They are also
used for new purposes - such as by small entrepreneurs - making
them even more desirable. The demand for mobile telephony in many
developing countries is thus likely to undergo further expansion,
despite the crisis. The production of IT and ICT-enabled services
also appears to have been relatively resilient (see
UNCTAD/PRESS/PR/2009/056).
By contrast, the production of various ICT goods and services has
been seriously affected by the global recession. The volatile
semiconductor industry has been among the worst hit. Revenue growth
also turned negative for the largest makers of such IT equipment as
computers and consumer electronic devices. The same is true of the
top manufacturers of communication equipment. Over the medium to
long term, however, companies will continue to upgrade their ICT
systems, as this is essential for their competitiveness. If
anything, the crisis has made effective corporate use of ICTs,
which improve efficiency, even more important.
Executive Summary of Chapter 1 [excerpts]
Monitoring the extent to which various parts of the world are
becoming connected to such ICTs as fixed and mobile telephony,
Internet and broadband is important as enhanced access is required
to reduce the "digital divide". The dynamism of these different
ICTs varies a great deal. While fixed telephone subscriptions are
now in slight decline, mobile and (to a lesser extent) Internet
usage continues to expand rapidly in most countries and regions. At
the same time, there is a widening gap between high-income and lowincome
countries in the area of broadband connectivity.
The number of fixed telecommunications subscriptions in the world
has been flat at around 1.2 billion since 2006, and even declining
somewhat in the most recent years. In 2008, there were on average
18 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants in the world. In developed
countries, teledensity was 47 while in developing countries it was
12.
...
At the end of 2008, the number of mobile subscriptions reached 4
billion. Although growth was somewhat lower than in the previous
year, it still remained close to 20 per cent in 2008. On average,
there are now 60 subscriptions per 100 people ...Reflecting
explosive growth, the penetration level in developing countries is
now eight times higher than what it was in 2000. Almost every
second person in developing countries is thought to have a mobile
phone and fewer than a dozen developing nations have a mobile
penetration of less than ten. ...
There were an estimated 1.4 billion Internet users around the world
at the end of 2008. Reflecting that the number of users grew five
times faster in developing than in developed countries, the former
now account for more than half of the world total. China hosted the
largest number of users (298 million), followed by the United
States (191 million) and Japan (88 million). A little over one
fifth of the world's population used the Internet in 2008. However,
wide gaps remain. While more than half the population in the
developed world is now online, the corresponding share is on
average only 15-17 per cent in developing and transition
economies.
...
There were an estimated 400 million fixed broadband subscribers
around the world at the end of 2008. Developing countries accounted
for almost 40 per cent of these subscriptions, making broadband one
of the few ICTs where developed countries still represent the
majority of users. The digital divide is particularly pronounced
in the case of broadband. Average penetration was more than eight
times higher in developed than in developing countries. ... China
has already emerged as the world's single largest broadband market,
followed by the United States. Brazil has also moved into the top
10 broadband markets.
AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with
a particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.
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