ICTlogy

Abstract:

Communication costs in Africa are currently thousands of times higher than in Europe or North America. This particularly affects those with the most limited resources: students, researchers, doctors, scientists, and other public servants, as well as the general public, who are unable to take full advantage of the unprecedented access to knowledge the internet provides.

Cheaper bandwidth for African institutions, particularly governments, schools, universities, libraries and hospitals would provide widespread access to the wealth of information available online, facilitate African contributions to the global economy and increase the likelihood of successful solutions to African development problems. So in a nutshell, the constraints on development in Africa caused by the high cost of communications are not being addressed due to inappropriate business models used for deploying international fibre infrastructure.