There has been a lot of excitement since last week over the Seacom fibre optic cable that went live this past Saturday at the Swahili Cultural Centre, Mombasa.
The undersea cable was commissioned simultaneously in Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa in Africa; and in India. Though from initial reports from the sponsors it is still a little bit premature to celebrate as the effects of fibre optic connectivity will not be felt till September (6 months late due to piracy activities off the coast of Somalia where the cable had to pass by).
There has been an expectation among end users that this will result in immediate downward trend of Internet costs, but I do not think this is likely to happen sooner as the investors need to recoup some of their initial investments. From media reports, Seacom will offer wholesale prices at around Ksh. 7,700 (USD $ 100)/mb, and at very subsidized prices of Ksh. 770 (USD $ 10)-1,925 (USD $ 25)/mb to educational, research and health institutions. Bandwidth currently cost Ksh. 42,350 (USD $ 5,000)/mb. The subsidized rates are of tremendous interest to stakeholders in the education sector, especially when we consider that it is estimated that about 3% of the 6,566 secondary schools (as at 31 December 2009) are connected to the Internet. Recent research indicates that a majority of these schools rely on tuition fees to sustain these connectivity, and spend up to 5% of their annual expenditure for such. Therefore, such subsidized costs will be a welcome relief to such schools, not only at the secondary level but also the primary schools. This calls for concerted efforts from the government and other stakeholders that concurrent efforts are undertaken to ensure wider penetration of Internet through provision of adequate power supply so as to provide ICT access to all schools, especially in rural areas so as to reduce the “rural urban digital divide” among other measures.
Already there have some noticeable difference in access speeds, and personally have noted that most domains on .ke (whether .ac, .co or .or) load much faster than previously experienced. Even NTV, incidentally the same agency as AKF which is the a major shareholder in Seacom, has moved to upped its digital media service by offering TV content online through streaming video or downloadable by partnering with Safaricom.
But this is bound to come with its own challenges, one of which has been argued by some players that the bandwidth is just too huge to be consumed and will result to redundancies. Consider this fact:- it is estimated that an average user in Kenya utilizes about a gigabyte of data/month, and Seacom will provide 160 gigabytes/second! The other issue has always been availability of locally relevant content, though there seems to be a lot of effort out there to rectify this anomaly by encouraging use and creation of local content by the KICTB and even Google Kenya. With high Internet speeds, we are also likely to attract the attention of hackers who have never bothered looking at this side of the world due to the trivial data transfer speeds in existence.
Let’s wait and see what happens in the next few weeks, as there is no information on what exactly happened of the government led EASSY fibre optic project.
