Hello, Me thinks fiber will take time to encroach Africa its true some African countries will take time to be covered, take Congo for example, to move from one town to another you have to be air lifted same as Angola one reason is the size of this country, its massive it equates to the whole of west Europe ( try it out place a map of Congo on top of Europe ) the other is Geography, war and govt bureaucracy , Europe has taken time to be covered so will Africa, Kenya has really tried and actually the question should be will the cost come down to affordable level, thus translating to fast connectivity? the way I view it is not actually to go to a cyber and pay 10 cents or something, but to get faster connectivity with the same amount that I pay now. I would like to pay, same but for higher bandwidth. I would like to experience what I do when I land in Europe.... The issue of VSAT, truth be told Vsats will be here long enough, who knows it might be the next technology, remember Undersea cables were there before then came Sat, maybe we will ditch the cables for more advanced Satellites .... 2009/5/19 Davis Waithaka <daviswaithaka@gmail.com>
Very good arguments I must say... and well thought out too.
On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 13:19 +0300, Okechukwu wrote:
The US is one of the most, if not the most, fibre'd region in the world, and Hughes installs 5,000 VSAT's every year - how then will a single fibre cause no more VSAT installations?
./Ok3ch
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 12:57 PM, Thomas Kibui <thomas.kibui@gmail.com> wrote: Hello, I concur with AFSAT. I work for a global network provider and we have seen a shift from sea bed fibre cable back to SAT in some Atlantic Sea-board countries in Africa eg Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, Cameroon etc.
This is primarily due to the fact that in most of those countries, the government owned telecommunications companies control and maintain connection to all the sea-bed fibre cables (WACS, SAT3, OnE) . Those companies eg. Nigeria Telecom (Nitel), Angola Telecom and the Cameroon Tel. have the same don't care attitude that Telekom Kenya had in the dark days. For instance there is a cyclone that took out the stub cable that runs from the cable station on shore to the main cable out to in the sea. It was spliced 11 days after it got cut. During that cable black-out one could not even call Angola coz all their voice telecoms pass over the cable. Nobody had bothered to check if the backup satellite links was alive since the cable was installed 3 years before. Our customer ordered for for a SAT connection without a second thought. We whipped up an Internet offload solution for him so that all critical traffic passed through the SAT connection and the other non-critical traffic took the cable route.
There are also many many intermittent outages that are not caused directly by the cable itself. For instance in Lagos Nigeria, there is a power blackout every 1 or 2 hours. People who have been there can bear me witness. When the power goes, all the switches in the last mile to the cable sub-station (including the sub-station itself) have to reboot. As a user somewhere inland, one will think that its the cable or the network service provider. Serious organizations eventually move back to SAT for their critical applications and voice communications.
Complete lack of or poor inland telecoms infrastructure in the same countries make it impossible for inland cities like Abuja in Nigeria, Huambo in Angola or Yaounde (of all places) in Cameroon to enjoy the benefits of sea-bed cable connectivity. Some of the causes are pure ignorance.. eg Cameroon .. Yaunde is less that 200km from Doula (at the coast) but has never bee connected .. well at least the last time I checked. The other are as a result of War. Did you know that the only way to travel within Angola inland eg from Luanda to Huambo is by Air !! why ? there are no roads completely ... why ? Land Mines ! .. millions of them. So who can risk their lives to go entrench fibre cable inland ? ... you guessed it .. Stick to the Satellite you know ...
Lastly they all suffer from cable vandalism syndrome. Here is a self explanatory link --->
http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/109817/vandals_cut_optical_fiber_cab...
To conclude ... I think that ... that is why SERIOUS organizations like Kenya Airways decided to deploy a pure satellite network for their Africa Offices and stations. read here --> http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/kenya-airways-selects-sita% E2%80%99s-vsat-network-10-million-deal
therefore VSAT still has some lifetime to live...
Please also note the VSAT is independent of geograhical boudaries. So lets no look at Kenya in isolation , now that the cable has arrived. Therefore iWAY will still have a large market. On the other hand Fibre cable is dependent on Georgraphy example I am sure that Ugandans would not want the fibre cable to Kamplala to pass through Kibera .. coz according to Museveni... there are some "Mad Jaluos" (no offence meant to my fello Luos) who can cause untold suffering in the name of Information Outage.. whenever he decides to annex something ...
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