THE GAME PLANS
While these two companies have embarked on different roads to market, they all have the same goal in mind—build out the networks so more people (read: potential customers) can connect to our services. Globally, the digital divide between those that have high speed access and those that don’t in developed regions is quickly narrowing. This means that markets in developed regions are reaching saturation points, running out of potential customers to sign up. This doesn’t leave a lot of room for late-comers to the connectivity party hoping to hook up with anyone. So what’s the next best thing? Start your own party of course.
O3b’s game plan is to tap into undeveloped regions around the world that are too remote to be served traditionally or haven’t built-out suitable fibre optic networks to benefit from the high speed undersea cables. O3b plans to hurdle over this infrastructure shortfall, by jumping all the way into space.
This from Google’s Africa Blog:
The O3b satellite constellation will provide high-speed, low-latency backhaul services at speeds reaching into the gigabits per second. The satellites will orbit the earth at about one-third the altitude of a geo-synchronous satellite, which means it takes less time for data to travel up and back. This low latency translates into better voice connections as well as a snappier web experience.
Current geo-stationery satellite-delivered backhaul offerings are expensive, clogged and wrought with bandwidth limitations. It’s not uncommon for 2 or 3 internet cafe’s in East Africa to share a single 1MB connection. Divide that 1MB of bandwidth among the average 15-20 surfers at each of those 3 cafes and you get an idea how maddeningly slow internet speeds can be. Exerstertbating the problem is the fact that 1MB comes at a cost to the cafe owner of almost $2000 per month.
EASSy’s strategy is grounded, literary, in fiber. A high speed network of optical fiber cables to be exact. Most of the world’s internet and telecommunications traffic runs on a global interconnected network of undersea fiber optic cables—hence the ‘world-wide web’. But the problem with this network is that it ignores Africa (as a whole) altogether. With the exception of South Africa, and a handful of landing points in West and Northern Africa, the global undersea cable network treats Africa like an annoying speed bump that you guide traffic around. As you can see in the diagram above, East Africa is wholly ignored. EASSy has been hard at work “closing the final link” since 2003.
The diagram also illustrates how deep the digital divide is between Africa and the rest of the globe, with Africa only getting an anemic share of the broad band cake. Not surprisingly, the heaviest traffic by far is routed between the East Coast of America and the EU.
{ 10 comments }
We are working with companies now to bring awareness to the issues of low-technology in Africa. Regarding the issue of adaptation, we made this 3-minute doc “West African Giggle” that tries to discuss the technology in an indirect fashion.
http://www.westafricangiggle.com
http://www.digitalcribs.net/DisplayVideo.aspx?id=971429327
Hi TMS Ruge,
Check out this post about transparency in laying submarine cable: http://manypossibilities.net/2008/05/transparent-undersea-cables/
IT points to a blog, discussion forum, and photo/video gallery and crucially, to a progress chart:
http://pipeinternational.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22&Itemid=66
Would be very cool for the E.Africa projects to do as well. One can always hope
Hi guys, thanks a lot for your insightful comments. There’s enough material in here to warrant a follow-up article. I’ve extended inquiries for comment to some of the entities discussed. I’ll see if they have anything to say by the time the article is published on Monday. I’ll dig a little deeper into the issue and find out what’s at stake in this space over the next 18 months.
Also, every time I am in Uganda, there isn’t a BHH. I hope you guys have a great time. Is there one in December? I will be in UG for the month.
Cheers
@McTim, definitely will see you at BHH!
@BSK It seems we are in violent agreement on these issues
AS for “some ISPs” capping service @ 200 MB per month, is this a certain yello company? In any case it can be seen in a couple of different ways.
A) This is an innovative product for “lite users” who want access, but don’t want to pay a lot for an “all you can eat” style connectivity. Pay as you go model enables consumers to control costs, .
B) This is an insidious “nose of the camel under the tent” attack on Net Neutrality by a telco meant to milk consumers by charging them per Byte .
In any case, clueful consumers/power users like us can see that this product isn’t useful for them. The question then is how to educate the folks who don’t have the same clue level. Hope to meet you at BHH on Thursday!!
@McTim, broadband to me, as least by Ugandan standards, is over 1 mbps, to the *internet backbone* not just to the ISP.
Don’t get me wrong, I do understand the costs of getting relatively fast internet connectivity in Uganda. I once did the figures and they were not pleasant. So maybe my use of the word “nonsense” was misleading.
I just find it very annoying for someone (read ISP) to come up with new versions of “broadband” every other month, and then some ISPs assign download limits of 200MB per month. I use that on an average day. For work.
Back to the main article, I’m not too sure if it’s good or bad in the long term, but the political wrangling in Africa alone has set us back so far it’s unbelievable. It’s a good thing there are foreign governments and corporations that see the potential we cannot see in our selves.
Thanks for your enlightenment though, McTim. I’m no ISP guru, but this information is very promising.
Thank you for shedding light on the undersea vs space race.
My observation is that LEO-Sat is a yet to be tried technology while undersea fiber is well tested technology. So I am inclined to keep my eyes on the several under sea fiber projects – at least for all major population centers of East Africa, even though hinterland cable laying has had its challenges (like people digging it up in some areas).
In the article, only EASSy and TEAMS are mentioned but I thought SeaCom was the first to commence.
IK
Hi TMS,
Sorry, I only read the first page when replying to this article. You clearly have a good grasp of the situation. My question is this: Where are the boats? In other words, what is the exact status of the projects? Are there ships at sea, laying cable? if so how much has gone off the drums into the sea? There is literally no information about this online (yet). Would love to see some from TEAMS or FLAG or anybody really.
@BSK What is Broadband for you, and why can’t you get it?
Whatever the answer to the first part of the question, the answer to the 2nd part is that it costs to much to get it via satellite.
For example, say you want 1 Megabit per second from your ISP. They buy that 1 Mb/sec at a cost ranging from ~2000 USD (for a large telco making a multi-Megabit purchase to 9000 USD(for a small ISP buying just the single Megabit per second. Now, they could sell that to you at cost plus x percent, or they could sell the same 1 Mb/sec multiple times to numerous customers in order to bring down costs and hopefully increase profits at the same time.
The bottom line is that they are selling a very scarce commodity, and the reason it is scarce is because of the cost of carrying the bits to and fro using scarce spectrum via Geo-synchronous satellites (which are multibillion dollar investments). LEOs (Low-Earth Orbit) OTOH, are much smaller investments, provide lower latency and use freely available spectrum. Fibre is expensive to lay, but provides several orders of magnitude more bandwidth.
@TMS Both fiber and satellites will be useful in the future, while there is an element of first to market/first mover advantage, it’s not a clear cut race to see which comes first. There are places that will never be served by fibre, which is where 03b connectivity will be useful, and there are circumstances where fibre will have market advantages.
For telcos, their object has traditionally been to maintain scarcity which keeps prices (and margins) high, ISPs globally OTOH operate in a very low margin commodity business. Currently margins for ISPs are higher in East Africa than they are globally. Both the o3b and fibre projects will bring their costs down, and hopefully these cost savings will be passed on to the consumers. Both will be disruptive and highly beneficial if/when built. I eagerly await both types of connectivity.
NB: EASSy may still be around as an idea and mulitstakeholder protocol, but the project to lay submarine cable to East Africa is now called smt like the NEPAD African regional broadband initiative, and due to political wrangling, the Kenyans are building their own called TEAMS and others are planning and building their own submarine links as well. So it’s not just a race between fibre and o3b, but a race amongst the various fibre projects as well.
Being directly involved with the Internet industry in Uganda, (Node Six does hosting and web applications), I’ve been holding my breath for a very long time, waiting for true broadband, not the nonsense the telecoms and ISPs keep throwing in our faces.
And it’s a breath of fresh air to see some serious contenders coming up.
Very Interesting and insightful article. Can’t wait for part two.
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 3 trackbacks }