I should preface this post by mentioning that I have readers along the Mediterranean coast of Africa, as well as from the general confines of the Republic of South Africa (I am also quite lucky to know some very good people from SA…!). What I am excited about is that east Africa (and then on to central Africa…) is in the process of being connected (to India, and later, to Europe too…) via a large capacity fiber optic cable…this means that the global connectivity is coming closer to fruition (with commensurate advantages for all!).
I am personally excited about some of the prospects that this (along with many other online issues) may bring in the future. The Ham radio operator part of me has always been interested and sometimes amused by the wide ranging hits this blog gets. I have even gotten readers from Greenland, The Maldives, and from a couple countries in West Africa…
While this may not be the most enlightening or important aspect of the goal of global connectedness; it does show me (at least) where some of our future may lie.
This Is Where the Magic Happens
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/07/this-is-where-the-magic-happens
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.
Landing the cables is the hard part. It took three months to dig, lay, and cover those seven kilometers, using local barges and professional divers. By contrast, the cable that runs to Djibouti along the 1500 kilometers 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, and then be routed elsewhere by leased lines.
