Last piece of fibre-optic jigsaw falls into place as cable links east Africa to grid
Posted in: Digital Divide at 18/08/2008 23:18
They are the arteries of the modern world. Stretching for tens of thousands of miles over the ocean beds, the vast web of intercontinental submarine cables have brought the possibility of cheap high-speed internet and clear long-distance telephone calls to all major parts of the globe. Except one.
East Africa remains the only large, inhabited coastline cut off from the global fibre-optic network. Reliant entirely on expensive satellite connections, people on the world's poorest continent pay some of the highest rates for logging on or phoning. Local universities are charged up to 50 times more for bandwidth than a typical American college, making online research slow or impossible.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/aug/18/east.africa.internet
