Thank you very much for contributing with such an informative comment. It’s good to see that much is being done. Seacom seems like a great initiative.

I figure its only fair that I share some of the things that are happening on the continent, to provide the other side of the story!

First of all, Seacom will arrive in June 2009, that will be the first reasonably priced international bandwidth, and will significantly help the international situation. TENET (The academic network in South Africa) has actually purchased an STM-64 (10gigabit) on this cable on a life of cable IRU, at a cost that was approximately 400 times cheaper than the current price per paid, and this is a signed done deal.

Seacom also lands in multiple countries up the East Coast, so this is the first East Coast cable going all the way down the side of the continent, and should provide significant cost savings there.

If I am correct, with regards to telecommunications industries, Kenya’s industry is fast becoming heavily deregulated, and the Ugandan industry is also far less regulated than it used to be. We are also seeing large scale fiber build outs in Mozambique and Rwanda (I am looking at this from the academic network perspectives, since that is the industry I am involved in)

South Africa is currently also in the process of deploying the SANReN network, which is going to be once fully built, one of the fastest academic networks on the planet (almost 500gigabit in the core), the hardware for this has already been purchased and the University of Witwatersrand and the University of Johannesburg in South Africa already have 10gigabit connections back to the primary core nodes of the academic network.

With regards to the internet exchange traffic, its difficult to speak to the other African countries exchanges, but with regards to JINX in Johannesburg, I can confirm that TENET has a gigabit connection in there, and will upgrade it to 10gigabit as soon as the exchange actually has the interfaces available. One of the reasons for the low amounts of traffic on the exchange however is due to equivalent line charge pricing models of the exchange, and as a result there is a large amount of private peering going on which is largely hidden from public view. (TENET peers with Internet Solutions for example at 10gigabit in Cape Town and 10gigabit in Johannesburg). It is kind of sad to note however that the South African incumbent player (Telkom/SAIX) still refuses to join the exchange.

Then we also need to make mention of Neotel, the second network operator in South Africa, who is making headway, the prices are still high, but they are dropping as competition becomes a reality.

The point is, things are changing, day by day things get better. Lets look at the positives as well, and focus on what we can do to enforce those, rather than looking at the negatives and enforcing those!

Suhayl