Fibre optic: We never imagined it this good

As African Internet services providers connect this week to the newly commissioned Seacom undersea fibre optic cable, how can we size up what this really means?

For me, this is easy. A mere 13 years ago, my Tanzanian business partner, Bill Sangiwa, and I set up one of the first ISPs in Africa, CyberTwiga.

We purchased half of the commercially available Internet bandwidth in Tanzania.

Sufficient for an e-mail only service, that circuit ran at about half the data speed of a normal dial-up phone connection.

We paid $9,000 a month for this tiny data backbone, which became cranky during heavy rains.

Our users were delighted, in 1996, to pay $150 a month for an unlimited e-mail service. They could eliminate fax machines. Bill configured a laptop to send data over a mobile phone connection.

Potential clients found this simply astonishing. They had to have it even if we charged them $400 to sign up. We worked from dawn until dusk setting up client computers and still had a backlog.

With time the business grew, we sold Netscape’s web browser and boosted our satellite bandwidth.

We deployed our first fixed wireless services in Dar, for which clients paid dearly (about $3,000 in hardware) in 1997.

Everybody was happy. Though the Internet reached mainly businesses, and a few Internet cafes sold services to the public, we made a difference.

Enter Seacom, whose minimum bandwidth purchase requirement costs about the same as I paid for my circuit in 1996.

But at this price Seacom supplies more than 800 times the bandwidth! I did the math — twice.

And the fibre optic cable is three to four times faster than satellite connections, boosting service quality.

And of course millions of mobile phone users now have the Internet in their palms.

Tens of thousands of users, even home users, now have fixed wireless access.