Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 2 | Africa Goes Online, page 3 (low bandwidth)

A growing number of hotels and business centers also offer Internet access. Roaming dial-up access is now a reality for travelers to most African countries courtesy of SITA, the airline cooperative, which has by far the largest data network in Africa. SITA’s Equant unit, which was formed to service the non-airline market, maintains dial-up “points of presence” in about 40 African nations.

“I really didn’t find anyplace where I couldn’t find the Internet,” says John Perry Barlow, an American writer and thinker on computer connectivity who has repeatedly visited Africa. “Even Timbuktu.”

The result is that, all things considered, a surprising number of Africans are using the Internet. It is difficult to count actual users, but the number of Internet dial-up subscriber accounts is readily available, and it is striking—more than one million to date. Of these, North Africa is responsible for about 200,000 and South Africa for 650,000, leaving about 150,000 for the remaining 50 African countries. But each computer with an Internet or e-mail connection supports an average of three users, a recent study by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa has found. This implies a total African user base of around three million, two-thirds of them in South Africa. That works out to a ratio of one Internet user for every 750 people outside South Africa, compared to a world average of about one for every 35 people. (The ratio in North America and Europe is about one in three.)

Kenya in particular is setting the pace in sub-Saharan Africa. It recently established the first public Internet peering point exchange for ISPs in Africa outside of South Africa. A peering point is a neutral computer where ISPs can exchange traffic between their respective users without having to do so via their international links. That saves time and bandwidth.

Kenya also recently rolled out its first national Internet backbone connecting six cities with the use of digital switches, fiber-optic cable and satellite services. Access costs are expected to drop by up to 70 percent in the next two years or so. The results are already evident in terms of entrepreneurial Internet opportunities: The number of ISPs shot from 7 to 23 in the space of a few months and more than 50 ISP licenses have been issued by the national regulator. The cost of surfing the web dropped to a maximum of $3 an hour from $8 an hour (in a country where annual income averages just $250). There also has been an explosion of local “dot coms” created by young entrepreneurs. One example is Kelele.com, an “infotainment” site that concentrates on the Nairobi base of users.

Nigeria is also opening up its Internet market. The country’s telecom regulator has licensed 38 ISPs to sell services and about 12 are already active. With a fifth of the population in the sub-Saharan region, Nigeria has been one of the slumbering giants of the African Internet world; until mid-1998 it only had a few dial-up e-mail providers and a couple of full-service ISPs operating on very low bandwidth connections. (It’s no wonder, given that the annual cost of an international leased line was $130,000—and it was still slower than modern modem speeds.) The national telecom operator—Nitel—has now op- ened up Internet access in Lagos with a two megabit link to the United States and has set up additional points of presence in four other cities. The Nigerian government is being supported in this by the United Nations Development Program in a $1 million project to help Nitel establish the Internet backbone. This “Internet Initiative for Africa” also aims to strengthen Nitel’s telecommunication school to become a regional Internet training center.

In some ways, Internet use in Africa is not so different from Internet use elsewhere. It is disproportionately white, educated and affluent, and the ‘net is used by some people for the same panoply of ends as in the rest of the world. But in other ways African Internet use is very different. Barlow recalls African programmers undertaking “heroic” coding to get an ancient IBM XT to act as a server, and a computer center in Uganda that received e-mail for everyone in the village. Messages would simply be dumped to a printer and posted on the walls.

In truth, Internet use in Africa looks a little like its use in this country a decade ago in that it often involves a technically educated elite, takes place via slow and unreliable connections and leans heavily to e-mail, the worldwide killer app that requires relatively little in the way of bandwidth or expensive desktop equipment. Getting enough bandwidth to access the graphics-intensive World Wide Web remains a big problem in most African countries, where sky-high tariffs make international connections hugely expensive, and where growing numbers of users make the strain on existing connections worse. There are also almost no Internet links between neighboring countries, and for various reasons a growing number of African Internet servers are situated overseas. One result is that e-mail from one user to another in the same city often travels by way of the United States or Europe.

Next page: “What we’re funding is university strengthening,” says Andrea Johnson, a Carnegie Corporation program officer who is working on the project.

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