[By Duncan McLeod]
In the past month, news has emerged of plans to build yet more high-capacity undersea cables to wire up Africa. With the continent about to be awash in bandwidth, attention needs to shift to bringing broadband to consumers.
It feels like almost every week that new cable projects are being unveiled that will bring yet more high-speed submarine capacity to Africa.
There’s an investment rush underway, with billions of dollars being poured into submarine fibre optics.
Just in the last month, SA’s eFive Telecoms has outlined plans to build a system linking SA and Nigeria, with a spur between Angola and Brazil. If the project goes ahead, which appears likely, it will result in the first submarine cable connecting Southern Africa and South America.
Then there’s Lion-2, a R530m project led by France Telecom that will result in a cable being built from the Indian Ocean islands of Reunion, Madagascar and Mauritius to Kenya in East Africa. Announced earlier this week, it’ll be the fourth cable to land in Kenya, where nothing short of a communications technology revolution is underway.
The eFive and Lion-2 projects join a long and growing list of projects — some, like Seacom and Eassy, already live — that are bringing massive communications pipes to the continent.
Five years ago, sub-Saharan Africa was served by one cable system, with an ultimate design capacity then of 120Gbit/s. If all the projects now being planned come to fruition — and most of them will — the region will have more than 15 000Gbit/s landing on its shores.
South Africans, who had become used to sipping bandwidth through a tiny straw, will soon be gorging themselves on masses of cheap broadband.
Bandwidth prices, already tumbling, will continue to fall precipitously. A price war in mobile data, similar to the one that’s already underway between fixed-line broadband service providers, now appears inevitable.
The investment in undersea cables around Africa is not unlike the boom in cable systems between Europe and North America in the late 1990s. Yes, some investors will probably lose their shirts, but the benefits to the continent will be significant and long lasting.
A map showing the cables that will connect Africa in 2012 paints a picture of one of the world’s most wired places.
Unfortunately, that’s only half the story. Backhaul, the high-speed links that connect the submarine cables to operators’ access networks (their wireless base stations and telephone exchanges), remains an enormous problem.
Though SA is generally on the right track, with big investments now happening in national backhaul infrastructure, much work still remains to be done. Elsewhere on the continent, where terrestrial fibre networks are almost nonexistent, the picture is much less rosy.
Without high-capacity fibre to connect base stations, mobile operators aren’t able to pass on all the capacity from the submarine fibre systems.
Clearly, big investment is still needed if African consumers are to benefit from the submarine cable bonanza.
Here, African governments can play a role, but not in the way many of them may be inclined to think.
Instead of involving the state in building national backhaul systems — as SA has done with Broadband Infraco — governments in the region need to empower the private sector to deliver the goods by opening up telecoms markets to unfettered competition. And deliver they will.
Anyone with any doubt about the spending power of African consumers should remember how successful companies like MTN and Zain (recently renamed Airtel Africa) have been in providing voice communication.
A broadband revolution in Africa will follow on from the voice revolution as smartphones and other mobile Internet devices like tablet computers tumble in price.
Africa is hungry for connectivity. Voice was just the start.
- Duncan McLeod is editor of TechCentral; this column is also published in Financial Mail
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