By Jeph Ajobaju, Chief Copy Editor
In Lagos and in Nairobi, connecting the internet can be fast or slow, depending on where you are in the city and the capacity of your Internet Service Provider (ISP).
Compared with prices elsewhere, both the financial and time cost of internet access in any Africa city is very high. And ruralites in villages and hamlets do not even come anywhere close to the web.
So Africa and global tech giants have to brainstorm how to source and invest $100 billion dollars in the next 10 years to upgrade broadband, expand it, and make it cheaper by 2030.
The young and the internet savvy constitute more than half the entire African population of 1.32 population, which is always searching Google, chatting on Facebook, and exchanging information on WhatsApp.
But, right now on the continent, the average price for one gigabyte of data costs 7.12 per cent of average monthly income, more than three times higher than the defined affordability benchmark of 2 per cent of average income elsewhere.
That translates into paying $3.40 more per gig for mobile data. Across the continent, average internet penetration rate is a mere 24 per cent.
A report by the Broadband for all Working Group says the telecoms industry, governments, multilateral institutions, investors, and development finance partners need to invest over $100 billion over the next 10 years.
The 2030 target aligns with the United Nation’s sustainability development goals.
According to the Working Group, to double broadband connectivity by 2021, about $9 billion has to be invested in infrastructure to ensure 220 million Africans come online for the first time.
Underwater cables
On their own, Google and Facebook are trying to ensure hundreds of millions of people get online to use their services by putting underwater cables around Africa.
The world’s largest tech firms are facilitating internet infrastructure and by extension, causing a rapid growth in internet usage.
This is an effort aimed at driving down bandwidth costs and making it easier for tech giants to sign up more users, creating more of an audience for advertising.
Facebook is working on plans for ‘Simba’, named after the Lion King character, an underwater cable that will circle the continent with landings on multiple coasts.
MailOnline reports that Google’s underwater cable plans are much further along, as it has confirmed construction plans for a cable connecting Portugal and South Africa.
It is unclear whether or not Facebook will partner with African telecoms operators, especially for funding.
But Google’s underwater cable plans is funded by the company itself, and its first phase is due to be completed by 2021.
Google’s new cable, named Equiano, will have 20 times the capacity of the most recent projects laid in Africa and will first branch out in Nigeria – the continent’s largest internet market, with a population of 200 million.
Africa is the second most populous continent after Asia. And Africa being the youngest continent by age of its population represents a significant opportunity for these firms to provide people with their business.
The total population using the internet in Africa is just 24 per cent as over half the total population is without internet access.
Despite high cost of access, however, this represents significant improvement from 2005 when internet connections stood at just 2.1 per cent.
Below is a detailed report by The Telegraph (UK) on the reasons the tech giants are keen on circling Africa with undersea cables.
Unexplored goldmine
Africa is the last major region where the internet has yet to fully arrive. Even in the tech-loving under-24 age group, fewer than half of Africans are online: this is not true on any other continent.
For some companies, this is a massive business opportunity.
“At Facebook, we have a saying that we’re only 1 per cent done, and this couldn’t be truer for Facebook in Africa,” says Nunu Ntshingila-Njeke, Facebook’s first head of Africa.
Fewer than 13 per cent of Africans use Facebook, a uniquely low figure. The web giant doesn’t want to sell internet access: it has been very clear that it won’t become a telecommunications company.
Ntshingila-Njeke, as one would expect, has a background in advertising rather than telecoms. But it is very much in Facebook’s interest that internet access should be widespread, high quality and affordable.
Africa faces different internet obstacles to those seen in the West, where the story of internet access was mostly one of “last mile” connections to end users. Today, however, lots of Africans have smartphones and many can access mobile data.
Their difficulty is that African bandwidth is the most expensive in the world. Even for those who can afford it, the internet frequently breaks down across huge swathes of the continent.
The underlying trouble in Africa is nowhere near the user, but in the backbone internet behind the telco or ISP.
All over the world, this network backbone is made up primarily of optical fibres, with key links generally running under the sea via submarine cables.
It might seem that global connections are not needed for many local tasks, but in the modern internet era this is seldom true.
If one African Facebook user interacts with another, both of them need to be connected to a Facebook data centre. There are no Facebook data centres in Africa.
Problem with submarine cables
The problem with submarine cables is that they routinely get broken by storms, seismic events, fishing gear, ships’ anchors, et cetera. This is rarely even noticed in the developed world, as there are many alternative routes.
As an example, there are 16 cables linking Europe to North America.
In the developing world there are fewer undersea pathways. Back in 2008, just two breaks caused by a ship’s anchor took down the internet across the Middle East and India.
Conspiracy theories still circulate regarding cable breaks that year, though nothing terribly unusual occurred.
Many new cables have been laid since then, but only a few to Africa. Many coastal African nations have only one or two submarine cable landings.
Reasons for high cost
The lack of competition is a major factor making African bandwidth expensive.
Monopoly or duopoly suppliers can charge high prices – and often the organisation selling access to a cable landing is the nation’s incumbent telco, meaning that it may try to keep local rivals off the cable altogether.
In recent times when the South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) cable was the only one in South Africa, it was reported that Telkom South Africa was quoting prices to its competitors for SAT-3 access that were actually higher than using satellites.
Various people, including Elon Musk, are working on reasonably-priced satellite broadband with acceptable latency, but they are not there yet.
Telcos are not necessarily unhappy with a situation of high prices, of course.
It was also reported at the time of the SAT-3 monopoly that South African ISPs were making 60 per cent of their revenues from reselling overpriced international bandwidth.
Investors in the Eastern Africa Submarine System cable (EASSy), which opened some years later, included prominent African mobile operators.
Among them were Airtel, Vodafone subsidiary Vodacom and of course Orange, which claims one in 10 Africans as customers and continental revenues of €5.2 billion (£4.6 billion). Telkom SA is an EASSy owner, too.
The continent remains poorly connected and prices remain high, despite the telcos’ cable involvement.
Facebook attempted to drill past the price barrier by paying telcos to provide its services, plus selected other parts of the web, to Africans for free: but this is not really an answer.
Any attempt to monetise the supposedly philanthropic “Free Basics” platform would surely attract even more criticism than the idea already has, and the telcos can shut it off at will.
The general paucity of African cables also means weak redundancy and poor reliability: most cable landings are branches from just a handful of coastal main lines.
A particular issue is that Africa’s main cables run up and down the coasts but most don’t go around the Cape. This means that if one of Africa’s main coastal cables goes out, the countries south of the break cannot use it.
At the moment, most of the east African coast is served by only two main lines, as is much of the west. A fairly ordinary two-cable break could thus cut off an entire side of the continent.
A single outage in the ACE (African Coast to Europe) cable last year caused disruption in 10 countries. All this might have been acceptable once, but things have changed.
Global international bandwidth use surged by 40 per cent every year from 2012 to 2017, according to TeleGeography. Most of this is caused not by end users, but by the swelling bandwidth requirements of the content and cloud providers.
Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft are responsible for approximately 70 per cent of the increase, according to Cisco figures.
Major cloud providers need data centres around the world to serve customers.
The prospect of such a centre being cut off from the wider network by an event as common as an undersea cable break – or even two – is unacceptable, as it needs to continually exchange massive amounts of data with the cloud’s other centres to keep functioning properly.
Facebook with its colossal content delivery network operates in much the same way.
This has already led the web giants to get directly involved in the submarine cable business, upgrading the global backbone to meet the burgeoning requirements of their cloud networks.
Microsoft and Facebook built their MAREA (Spanish for “tide”) cable because the existing transatlantic cables mostly landed in a small area of the northeastern United States seaboard, and Hurricane Sandy affected them all.
Facebook has also partnered with Google on the new Pacific Light Cable from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. The cloud majors have been active in other recent projects.
At least three cable options required for reliability
Facebook and the other big cloud companies may be keen to do business in Africa, then, but Africa’s submarine cables are not up to the job.
There are just two cloud data centres in all of Africa (both Microsoft, predictably in South Africa, one of the few African nations with reasonable undersea connectivity).
And bandwidth prices for most Africans remain much too high for the web giants’ liking.
If it’s left to the telcos to build and own the cables, that situation may persist for a long time.
So the recent news is that Facebook is in talks to build a new African cable that would “encircle the continent”. That would mean at least three cable options on each coast and the ability to route around the Cape, bringing better reliability.
Three sea routes is regarded as the minimum for a major data centre, so the proposed “Simba” cable would open up Africa for the internet giants at a stroke.
Facebook’s particular scheme may not go ahead, of course. It seems all but certain, however, that some such project will.