InternationalTelecommunicationUnion

HIPSSA ProjectHIPSSA Project

Support for Harmonization of the ICT Policies Support for Harmonization of the ICT Policies in Sub-Sahara Africa in Sub-Sahara Africa

Measurement of the impacts of the arrival of submarine

cables in Africa

Isabelle Gross – Balancing Act

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Table of contentsTable of contents

Introduction

Abundance of capacity

Falling wholesale prices of international capacity

Redundancy

What’s the picture at the retail level?

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Introduction:Safaricom’s data subscribers and penetration rate

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Abundance of capacity

- several countries with access to 3 and up 5 submarine cables

- Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, SA

- overcapacity??? Maybe

- next challenge for many African countries is to bring the capacity inland (e.g.Liberia, Sierra Leone, etc..) = dense and redundant national backbones

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Abundance of capacity

… … and reinforce cross-border terrestrial connections

Examples on next 2 slides:

* Phase 3 Telecom in West Africa (network that is planned to span through Nigeria, Benin, Niger and Togo

* Liquid Telecom: Owned by Econet in Zimbabwe, its network currently covers Zimbabwe and reaches into South Africa, into Botswana and into Zambia.

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Liquid Telecom’s cross border terrestrial fibre network

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Falling wholesale prices of international capacity

- in particular in countries where there are now 2/3 submarine cables (but not necessarily the case in countries where there will be only 1 cable = need for regulation)

- prices are as low as US$100 per Mb at STM1 level or even lower (3 years ago in Nigeria 1MB was US$2000/3000 while today it is US$100)

- prices will fall further (ACE+WACS)

- Ask participants what has happen in their country?

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Falling wholesale prices of international capacity

► the next challenge… …

- bring international capacity at an affordable price to landlocked countries

- transit costs too high in comparison to international capacity: 3 to 4 times more and sometimes up to 10 times more

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Redundancy

► more and more African countries have now more than 1 exit route but still some African countries left with one single exit route (Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc)

► improved quality of services with less downtime (in theory 100% uptime but they have still been long outage on the East as well as on the West Coast – the case of Benin and its impact on neighbouring countries)

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Redundancy

► more and more African countries have now more than 1 exit route but still some African countries left with one single exit route (Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc)

► improved quality of services with less downtime (a theory but they still have long outage on the East as well on the West Coast – the base of Benin and its impact for neighbouring countries)

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What’s the picture at the retail level?

► retail prices have come down but less than expected: more bandwidth offered to customers but not necessarily cheaper but prices are coming down

► encourage the development of wider range of data offerings: take up of mobile data services (South Africa, Kenya, etc…)

► encourage the development of content, value added services, e-government applications and services

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What’s the picture at the retail level?

► The challenge is

to get data services in less populated and rural areas

- not necessarily a profitable business and - will need some sort of public funding

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What possible market dynamic for data services?

What’s the picture at the retail level?

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Thanks a lot for your Thanks a lot for your attentionattention

Union Internationale des Télécommunications International Telecommunication Union