Communications and information infrastructure has improved dramatically in Africa over the past 5 years. The Internet, satellite television, cellular phones and itemised billing are now widespread on the continent. But what might have been unthinkable a decade ago is still a dream for the majority of Africans those who do not live in the capital cities and are not part of the elite. Access to telephones is still very scarce on the continent – there are only about 14 million lines installed – fewer than the number of phones in Manhattan or Tokyo, and most of the lines are concentrated in the urban areas, while over 70% of the population is rural. Likewise, cellular phone coverage is generally confined to the capitals and secondary cities. Excluding South Africa, there are fewer than 100,000 dialup Internet accounts for over 700 million people, and as Internet Service Providers are usually concentrated in the capital cities, it is a long distance call to the Internet for most of the (predominantly rural) public. Furthermore, much of the available information on the Internet is oriented toward westernized and urban populations, with few applications relevant to Africa’s rural people.

Africa’s Information Infrastructure

Radio is still by far the most dominant mass medium in Africa with ownership of radio sets being far higher than for any other electronic device. In 1995 radio ownership was estimated by UNESCO at close to 18 per hundred inhabitants, compared to 3.5 televisions per hundred and 0.31 personal computers per hundred. Over 60 percent of the population of the sub-continent are reached by existing radio transmitter networks while national television coverage is largely confined to major towns. Some countries still do not have their own national television broadcaster, even relatively well developed ones such as Botswana.

It should be noted however, that many people listen to the same radio or watch a television at the same time. In fact, large scale sharing of information resources is a dominant feature of the African media landscape. There are usually 3 users per dialup Internet account, as many as 10 people read every copy of a news paper and it is not uncommon to find most of a small village crowded around the only TV set, often powered by a car-battery or small generator.

An increasing number of commercial radio stations are being established following liberalisation of the sector in many countries. However the news and information output of these commercial stations is often either a re-broadcast of the national (state-controlled) broadcaster's news, or that of an international broadcaster or news agency. Local news and current affairs, especially that focusing on events outside of the capital, is rarely broadcast and community broadcasting has been slow to take off in the region. Genuine community broadcasters are scarce, nevertheless, Ghana, South Africa and Uganda have seen notable numbers of new community radio licencees.

Satellite-based broadcasting has seen major activity on the continent in the last few years.

In 1995 the South African company M-Net launched the world's first digital direct-to-home (DTH) subscriber satellite service called DSTV. Subscribers have access to over 30 video channels and 40 audio programmes on C-band to the whole of Africa and on lower-cost KU-band to Southern Africa south of Lusaka.

Last year South Africa's public broadcaster, SABC, launched Channel Africa, a new satellite-based news and entertainment channel aimed at the continent.

In 1998 North Africa started receiving Direct-to-home (DTH) TV broadcasts from Nilesat, the continent's first locally owned geostationary satellite, capable of broadcasting up to 72 digital TV programmes simultaneously. Operated by the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (ERTU), the country's national broadcaster, Nilesat's coverage extends as far south as northern parts of Chad, Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia (as well as from Morocco in the west to the Arabian Gulf in the east).

A number of private companies and development agencies such as the World Bank have begun broadcasting training courses to downlink centres equipped to receive video casts.

Data broadcasting of web pages and email in is now being offered by two companies in Southern Africa.

The market for DTH satellite TV broadcasting as well as audio, data and telephone services is also expected to be entered shortly by the highly experienced European operators, Eutelsat, who are offering to focus the steerable antenna on their Hotbird 3 satellite over Africa. The audience for satellite broadcasts are, however, largely confined to the elite who can afford the equipment and subscription fees.

The US-based WorldSpace Corporation launched a radio broadcasting satellite called AfriStar in September 1998 and has begun test broadcasts with 12 channels using uplink hubs in South Africa, Ghana and London. Broadcasters in Europe, the US and in Egypt, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali and South Africa have already signed up to provide content. WorldSpace aims to make a suite of over 80 audio channels available to anyone on the continent who can afford $150-200 for the special digital radio. A range of audio quality streams from 16Kbps for AM mono stations (good for all voice stations) to 128Kbps CD quality music channels will be available, as well as data services, including the transmission of web pages.

There has been an increase in the rate of expansion and modernisation of fixed telecommunication networks overall the past several years, and the number of main lines is now growing at about 10 percent a year across Africa. However, this increase starts from a very low base, much of the growth is in the urban areas and the overall teledensity is still only about one per 200 inhabitants (versus 0.52 per 100 in 1996, the latest year for which there is data). Between 1990 and 1995, 6 countries actually experienced decreases in their teledensities according to the ITU - Liberia, Ghana, Republic of Congo, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

Furthermore, 50 percent of the available lines are concentrated in the capital cities, where only 10 percent of the population live. In some countries, notably Eritrea, Guinea-Bissau, Central African Republic, Sierra Leone, Burundi and Chad, the ITU has found that 80-95 percent of the lines are in the main city.

On a worldwide basis, sub-Saharan African has by far the least developed infrastructure. In 1996 the region contained almost 10 percent of the world's population, but only 0.4 percent of the world's telephone lines (2.9 million lines). This is fewer than the number of lines China installed in 1997 alone. There are currently over 1 million people on waiting lists for a phone. Compared to all of the low-income countries globally, which house 50 percent of the world's population and 10 percent of the telephone lines, the penetration of phone lines on sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is 5 times lower than the average low income country.

The continent (excluding South Africa) has only 2 percent of the world's international telecom circuits (about 16 000). The use of fibre optic cable for international traffic is still in its infancy in Africa, and most international telecom connections are carried via satellite. The exceptions to this are the marine optic fibre link from South Africa to the cross-Atlantic hub in the Canaries, and the SEA-ME-WEA cable running along the Mediterranean and down the Red Sea which provides access for North Africa and Djibouti.

There is a high level of variability between countries in the state of their existing telephone networks. Some countries have made telecommunications a priority and are installing digital switches with fibre optic inter-city backbones and the newest cellular and mobile technology. Among the world's most sophisticated national networks are in Botswana and Rwanda where 100 percent of the main lines are digital, compared with only 49.5 percent in the United States.

At the other end of the scale, large parts of the network in countries like Madagascar and Uganda are old analogue systems with poor national links between urban centres. Unfortunately these still overshadow the more advanced networks, and overall, the region averaged 116 faults per 100 lines per year, (i.e. every line installed had at least one fault each year), compared to a world average of 22 and a high income country level of 7 per 100 lines. Surprisingly, the proportion of digital lines on the sub-continent in 1996 was 69 percent - close to the world average of 79 percent.

On a sub-regional level, the countries of the Sahel and Central Africa, such as Mali, Niger and Democratic Republic of the Congo have fewer than 2 telephone lines for every 1000 people. North Africa and South Africa have a teledensity of around 35 per 1000, while West and East African coastal countries have densities between 2.5 and 10 per 1000. With the exception of North Africa and South Africa, only a few smaller countries have so far been able to increase their teledensity above 1 in 50 - these are Botswana, Cape Verde, Comoros, Gabon, Mauritius, and Swaziland.

Even if telecom infrastructure is beginning to spread, a much smaller proportion of the population can actually afford their own telephone. The cost of renting a connection averaged almost 20 percent of the 1995 GDP per capita, vs. a world average of 9 percent and only one percent in high income countries. Despite this, the number of public telephones is still much lower than elsewhere - about 1 for every 17 000 people, compared to a world average of 1 to 600 and a high income average of 1 to 200. However, an increasing number of operators are now passing over the responsibility for maintaining public telephones to the private sector, and there has been a rapid growth of "phone shops" in some countries, with the most well known success in Senegal which now has over 7 000 commercially run public phone points. While most of these are in urban areas, a growing number are being established in more remote locations, especially with the PTO Sonatel’s aggressive rollout of backbone infrastructure which is in the process of linking 2000 villages and towns by fibre optic cable.

Public Telephone Operators (PTOs) in some countries, such as Botswana and South Africa, provide a 'virtual phone' alternative for those unable to obtain their own phone. Subscribers are issued their own unique phone number and pay a small rental for a voice mailbox, from which they can retrieve their messages from any telephone. Pagers are available to inform the subscriber that a message is waiting.

There is a very large variation between countries in the charges for installation, line rental and call tariffs. In 1996 the average business connection in Africa cost US$112 to install, $6 a month to rent and $0.11 per 3 minute local call. However, installation charges were above $200 in some countries (Benin, Mauritania, Nigeria and Togo), line rentals ranged from $0.80 to $20 a month, and call charges varied by a factor of almost 10 - from $0.60 an hour to over $5 an hour. Local call tariffs in some countries have increased even further, to over $8.00 an hour (e.g. in Uganda, Gabon and Chad.

While many telecom operators are beginning to reduce their charges for international calls (prompted by the growth of call-back services), the high tariffs and large percentage of international calls mean that African telecom operators enjoy above average profits on their lines. The world average in 1996 was $1,000 of revenue per main line per year, but in SSA it was $1,175 and while even in high income countries the revenue was only $1,051 per line.

Mobile cellular telephony has experienced very rapid growth in Africa. From a presence in only 6 countries nine years ago, these are about 78 networks in 42 countries serving over 250 000 customers (excluding the two million in South Africa). Operators provide access mainly in the capital cities, but also in some secondary towns and along major trunk routes.

A majority of the systems in use are now based on the digital GSM standard, although international roaming agreements are virtually non-existent, and data communication facilities are often not available except on the older analogue systems that are still in use in many countries.

Telex use continues to decline in SSA but not as quickly as elsewhere - the number of subscribers declined by only 5 percent to 28,600 between 1990 and 1996, while the world average decline was over 15 percent, and over 20 percent for high income countries. Fax usage is hard to estimate as not all imports and attachments to the network are recorded, but the ITU estimates that these are over 100,000 fax machines in the sub-continent outside of South Africa - 0.2 percent of the world's total.

Traditional data communication services based on X.25 are available in half the countries (27), most prevalently in the francophone ones, which adopted the use of the Minitel before the Internet became available. X.25 packet-switched based services were in the past the most popular method of establishing wide-area data networks in Africa, but because of their high-cost, traffic-based tariffs, they are now mainly used by banks and other large corporations requiring secure real-time low-volume data transactions such as credit card verification. Prices for international traffic on the PSDNs in Africa are often $10-$15 / 64Kilobytes, although some value added networks such as SprintNet roll average traffic charges into an hourly rate which usually varies between $24 and $30 per hour. SITA's charges from Africa vary between $10 and $35 / hour or $75/Mb.

Internet

Internet access has grown rapidly on the continent over the last few years. At the end of 1996 only 11 countries had local access, but by April 1999 only the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), Eritrea and Somalia were still without local Internet services. Thus, 50 of 53 African countries now have direct Internet access.

Figure 1

Nevertheless Internet access in Africa has been largely confined to the capital cities, although a growing number of countries (currently Angola, Benin, Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe) do have Points of Presence (POPs) in some of the secondary towns, and South Africa has POPs in about 70 locations.

Figure 2

In some countries the PTOs have made a special policy to provide local call Internet access across the whole country. To do this, the local telecom operator establishes a special 'area-code' for Internet access that is charged at local call tariffs, allowing Internet providers to immediately roll out a network with national coverage. With the massively reduced costs for those in remote areas that this provides, it is surprising that so far only 10 countries have adopted this strategy - Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Malawi, Mauritius, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia and Zimbabwe.

The total number of computers permanently connected to the Internet in Africa (excluding those in South Africa) broke the 10,000 mark at the beginning of 1999. As measured by Network Wizards, growth is up 36% in six months from July 1998 when there were only about 7,800 hosts, to 10,703 in January 1999. The correct figure may actually be closer to 12,000 or 15,000 due to the measurement technique which cannot count hosts which are not properly reverse referenced in domain name servers. In any case this represents about one host per 75,000 people, or 0.024% of the world’s 43 million hosts. Nevertheless, the six-monthly African host growth rate almost doubled the world average (18%), so this a significant increase on the earlier figure of 0.021% in July 1998. Yet all of Africa has about as many Internet sites as Latvia, with a population of 2.5 million.

The opening up of the Nigerian Internet market will likely change the picture as the national telecom operator (Nitel) has big plans to provide Internet countrywide. With a fifth of Sub Sahara's population, Nigeria has been one of the slumbering giants of the African Internet world. Until mid 1998 Nigeria had a few dialup email providers and a full ISPs operating on very low bandwidth links, and few operators were able to afford the $130,000 a year cost for an international 9.6Kbps leased line. Nitel has now established a POP in Lagos with a 2MB link to Global One in the US and has put POPs in 4 other cities. The Nigerian telecom regulator has recently licensed 38 ISPs to resell the service, and about 12 are currently active.

Currently, the average total cost of using a local dialup Internet account for 5 hours a month in Africa is about $60/month (including usage fees, telephone time, but not telephone line rental). According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 20 hours of Internet access in the U.S. costs $29, including telephone charges. Although European costs are higher ($74 in Germany, $52 in France, $65 in Britain, and $53 in Italy) these figures are for 4 times the amount of access, and all of these countries have per capita incomes which are at least 10 times greater than the African average.

Nevertheless ISP charges vary greatly - between $10 and $100 a month, largely reflecting the different levels of maturity of the markets, the presence or absence of competition, the varying tariff policies of the PTOs and the different national policies on access to international telecommunications bandwidth.

Most African capitals now have more than one ISP, and in early 1999 there were over 300 public ISPs across the region. Seven countries had 10 or more ISPs – Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe – while 20 countries had only one ISP. Although Ethiopia and Mauritius are the only countries where a monopoly ISP is national policy (i.e. where private companies are barred from reselling Internet services), there are other countries in which this practice still continues, predominantly in the Sahel sub-region where markets are small. See Table 1 below for further details.

Source: Michael Jensen, mikej@sn.apc.org

In response to the high cost of full Internet based services and the slow speed of access to the World Wide Web, and also because of the overriding importance of electronic mail, many ISPs have launched lower-cost email-only services and are continuing to attract subscribers. Similarly, because of the relatively high cost of local electronic mailbox services from African ISPs, a large proportion of African email users make use of the free Web-based services such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Excite, most of which are in the US. These services can be more costly and cumbersome than using standard email software because extra online time is needed to maintain the connection to the remote site. But they do provide the added advantages of anonymity and perhaps greater perceived stability than a local ISP which may not be in business next year.

There is also a rapidly growing interest in kiosks, cybercafes and other forms of public Internet access, such as adding PCs to community phone-shops, schools, libraries, police stations and clinics which can share the cost of equipment and access amongst a larger number of users. Many existing ‘phone shops’ are now adding Internet access to their services, even in remote towns where it is a long-distance call to the nearest dialup access point. In addition a growing number of hotels and business centres provide a PC with Internet access.

The rapidity with which most African public telecom operators have moved into the Internet services market is also noteworthy. In the last three years PTOs have brought Internet services on stream in 31 countries and similar moves are afoot in three others (Liberia, Somalia and Tanzania). This follows trends in the developed countries where almost all of the PTOs have established Internet services. In many francophone countries the PTO operates the major value added service provider as a joint venture with France Cable and Radio (called Telecom-Plus in many countries and DTS in Madagascar).

In all the countries where the PTO has established the international Internet backbone, it is the sole operator except in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Mozambique, South Africa and Zambia. Usually the PTOs operate the international gateway or access to the national backbone, and leave the resale of end-user Internet access to the private sector. In a few countries the PTO operates a gateway in competition with the private sector, namely Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and Zambia.

As far as the multinational ISPs are concerned, AfricaOnline, now a subsidiary of UK based Africa Lakes (http://www.africaonline.com), is the largest operation. The group is consolidating a year of growth which saw local branches open in Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, adding to its stable in Ghana, Kenya, and Côte d’Ivoire. The other three multinational ISPs which operate subsidiaries or franchises in the region are now trailing considerably with UUNET found only in South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Namibia, while Swift Global is in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda.

Due to high international tariffs and lack of circuit capacity, obtaining sufficient international bandwidth for delivering web pages over the Internet is still a major problem in most countries. Very few of the countries outside of South Africa had international Internet links larger than 64Kbps until two years ago, but today 17 countries have 512Kps or more, and 10 countries have outgoing links of 1Mbps or more - Egypt, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Tunisia. Excluding South Africa, the total international outgoing Internet bandwidth installed in Africa is about 34Mbps. However this means that on average about 7 dialup users must share each 1Kbps of international bandwidth, making connections to remote sites very slow.

As a result, a growing number of African Internet sites are hosted on servers in Europe or the U.S. This is especially necessary for countries where ISPs operate their own independent international links without local interconnections (peering), such as in Kenya and Tanzania, which means that e-mail traffic between the subscribers of two ISPs in the same city must travel to the US or Europe and back. This makes it more efficient to host outside-country, and is also being encouraged because web hosting costs in Africa can be very high, while there are even a number of free hosting sites in the US and Europe.

One response to the bandwidth problem is that incoming bandwidth is now starting to outpace outgoing bandwidth, following the increasing use of data broadcasting services which are now being installed by ISPs in Africa. These use a DirecPC-type system providing incoming bandwidth of 64Kbps for about US$30-$1000/month (depending on usage). The assymetric service can deliver up to 8Mpbs incoming, while the normal terrestrial phone circuit or leased line is used for all outgoing traffic. This arrangement uses a standard digital KU-Band or C-Band satellite television antenna costing $175-$500 (depending on size required) and a decoder card for the PC costing US$450. In Southern Africa the service is provided by two South African companies - Infosat and Siyanda (http://www.infosat.co.za / http://www.siyanda.co.za). A similar service covering other parts of Africa via a different satellite is provided by Interpacket (http://www.interpacket.net).

These systems allow ISPs to limit traffic on their expensive existing links to outgoing data only, and to use a low-cost TV satellite dish for receiving the higher volumes of incoming traffic. This can substantially reduce the operating costs for the ISPs and increases the speed of access to the Web for their users.

Two-way satellite-based Internet services using very small aperture terminals (VSATs) to connect directly the US or Europe have also been quickly adopted wherever regulations allow (in Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia which all have ISPs that are not dependent on the monopoly telecom operator for their international bandwidth).

With the exception of some ISPs in Southern Africa, almost all of the international Internet circuits in Africa connect to the USA, with a few to the United Kingdom and France. However, Internet Service Providers in countries with borders shared with South Africa benefit from the low tariff policies instituted by the South African telecom operator for international links to neighbouring countries. As a result South Africa acts as a hub for some of its neighbouring countries - Lesotho, Namibia, and Swaziland.

The major international Internet suppliers are AT&T, BT, Global One/Sprint, UUNET/AlterNet, MCI, NSN, BBN, Teleglobe, Verio and France Telecom/FCR. A number of other links are provided by PanamSat and Intelsat direct to private and PTO groundstations in the US and UK, circumventing local PTO infrastructure.

Aside from the South African hub and a link between Mauritius and Madagascar, there are no other regional backbones or links between neighbouring countries. The main reason for this is that the high international tariffs charged by telecom operators discourages Internet Service Providers from establishing multiple international links. As a result ISPs are forced to consolidate all of their traffic over a single high cost international circuit. Roaming dialup Internet access is now a reality for travellers to most African countries courtesy of SITA, the airline co-operative, which has by far the largest network in Africa. SITA's commercial division, SCITOR (recently renamed Equant), which was formed to service the non-airline market, now operates dialup points of presence in 40 African countries. Subscribers to Internet service providers who are members of IPASS (a group of ISPs, including SITA, who share their POPs) can access their home ISPs for about $0.22c a minute. (See http://www.ipass.com. for details).

The only country in the region with an X.400 service is South Africa. Other advanced services such as ISDN and video conferencing are also generally not available on the continent - the only countries able to provide ISDN services are Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, the Seychelles, and South Africa, (which had 35,000 subscribers in 1996).

Voice over Internet (VOIP) services are not officially available anywhere in the region, and none of the telecom operators have implemented voice over IP technology for their traffic except for Egypt Telecom which is routing some of its voice traffic to the US over IP. Demand for most of these services is expected to increase once there is a broader penetration of computers and data processing equipment on the sub-continent.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has now taken over administration of Internet IP Address space for Africa (along with North America, South America, and the Caribbean). This means that address space is no longer free and until a local African Registry can be set up, networks will now be required to pay ARIN USD$2500 per year to obtain a Class-C address. While proposal for an Africa Network Information Centre (NIC) has been discussed for some years, progress is being made only now, partly because of the lack of on-the-ground national networking associations to support it and the political difficulties of identifying the appropriate host country and organisation to operate it.

There have been few attempts to establish email-to-fax gateways in Africa despite the apparent need, given the low penetration of the Internet. Currently the co-operative project known as the Experiment in Remote Printing (TPC) only has two African countries among the 27 in its coverage list - South Africa and Botswana. Likewise, none of the commercial Internet fax services have local delivery facilities outside of South Africa.

ICT hardware and software

Recent estimates for the number of PCs in Africa put the average at about 3 per 1000 people in 1996, however some studies, such as ACCT's 1995 survey, indicate that this may be an overestimate by between 3 and 6 times, making the average closer to less than one per 1000. Some of the wealthier countries such as Botswana, Mauritius and South Africa have significantly higher levels of penetration, at least 5 per 1000. A