Global Policy Forum

By Katy Salmon

African Internet users are being forced by Western companies to pay the full cost of connecting to the World Wide Web, while European and American users pay nothing. This is one of the main hurdles blamed for the slow spread of the Internet in the world's poorest continent.

''This is exploitation. These networks are raping Africa of half a billion dollars a year,'' says Richard Bell, chairperson of Kenya's Internet Service Providers (ISP) Association.

When an ISP in Africa wants to connect to the Internet, they have to purchase a link from Kenya to America to connect to the network over there. When a Kenyan customer sends an email to a recipient in America, the email travels by satellite to America and gets delivered to the recipient. The largest cost of getting that email from its origination to its destination is the cost of the satellite link from Kenya to America. The ISP in Kenya pays for that link.

Conversely, when a subscriber of 'America On Line' sends an email to a recipient in Kenya, the email will again travel to Kenya over the Kenyan ISP's satellite link, for which Kenyan subscribers bear the cost. Thus, the American subscribers send and receive email for free, whereas Kenyans have to pay for both.

International capacity in and out of Africa is estimated at about gigabyte of traffic, at a cost of 10,000 U.S. dollars per month per megabyte. These links are currently costing Africa more than 120 million U.S. dollars a year. ''However, if Africa was utilising the bandwidth it really requires, and which it would utilise if the cost of that bandwidth wasn't so high, the latent requirement for bandwidth is easily ten times the existing bandwidth,'' says Bell.

''In other words, the cost to Africa would be over a billion dollars a year, of which 50 percent should be borne by the European and North American networks, not by the African networks,'' he says. Asia suffered the same problem until a few years ago. But because of the size of their economies, they had sufficient volumes of traffic to be able to force that reversal for commercial reasons.

An international backbone based in America who wanted a guaranteed quality of service through to the Far East had to establish points of presence for their network in the Far East or else face not being able to guarantee the same quality of service there. ''The problem with Africa is that we do not have those volumes of traffic. And a lot of our traffic even within Africa is transiting through Europe and North America to get back to Africa again. So the problem is compounded two fold,'' complains Bell.

This problem should soon be a thing of the past following the launch of the Kenya Internet Exchange Point earlier this month. The aim is to ensure that Kenyan traffic remains Kenyan. Similar national exchanges are being set up in Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

''We are also in the process of setting up the Pan African Virtual Internet Exchange where the intention is to have direct interconnection between countries in Africa. The aim is to regionalise the traffic to reduce the overall costs,'' explains Bell. For example, traffic from Kenya to South Africa, instead of both countries having to pay the full cost of an international circuit to America, each would pay half the cost of a single circuit between Kenya and South Africa.

Mike Jenson, who runs the Africa Interconnectivity web site, believes this could make a significant difference. ''No one really knows how much intra-African traffic there is, but it's sure to grow and become significant. If only five percent is intra-regional, it would add up to a sizeable amount,'' he says.

This could end the ''rape'' that Bell complains about.

''If we can get enough traffic in Africa then maybe we can force some of these international backbones to start establishing points of presence in Africa instead of making us pay the full costs of going to their backbone or their nearest point of presence in North America,'' he hopes. Even before that happens, Bell believes that recent reforms will facilitate the take off of the Internet in Kenya.

''I believe that the building blocks are now being put in place, that Kenya will over the next 18 months see a huge explosion in internet usage. During the course of 2001, there was a significant change in the attitude and policies of the regulator, Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK). ''Previously the regulator was very reluctant to change and to move forward. If you look at the market structure from December 2001, it actually has opened up an enormous number of different sections of the market.

''I am convinced that CCK's attitude has changed and it now wants Kenya to be the number one Information Communication Technology market in Africa,'' Bell says.

Despite the CCK's new-found passion for the Internet, there are some issues it cannot tackle, such as the much-desired privatisation of the state-owned Telkom Kenya. Intense pressure from donors has not even managed to force the government to sell one of its favoured cash cows. ''Telkom is the biggest obstacle to the development of the Internet in Kenya,'' says Rita Gitobu of Kenyan ISP 'Wananchi On Line'.

''Getting lease lines from them is very hard,'' she charges.

Another long-standing gripe is Telkom's monopoly with its Jambonet international Internet backbone, which connects Kenya to the rest of the world. This monopoly is supposed to last until 2004. The new exchange point means that local traffic can now bypass Jambonet, but it is still the only option for international traffic.

Bell hopes this situation will change soon. ''We are confident that we will succeed in breaking the Jambonet monopoly, hopefully before the end of the year,'' he says. The December 2001 Market Structure -- a CCK document -- has a significant change in wording from previous ones. It says that Jambonet has the monopoly until 2004 depending on performance.

''And it performs very badly,'' says Bell. ''Our association has written to the regulator and requested the regulator to commission an independent study of the performance of Jambonet.''

''We are confident the independent study will demonstrate what we have been saying for the last two to three years, that the performance is not as good as is required.'' When that happen, CCK will be in a position to issue an additional licence for a second backbone before 2004.

''Whereas it doesn't appear at the moment for the consumer that a lot has changed, actually behind the scenes a lot of things have already changed and will continue to change,'' promises Bell. There are an estimated 100,000 subscribers in Kenya and four million across the continent.

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