About a week ago President Kibaki and the PM went to launch the cable station that recently finished construction. TEAMS is an underwater fibre-optic cable being installed along the coast of East Africa — a tremendous boost for all the countries affected. When it comes to internet bandwidth, Africa has always been left behind, thanks to monopolies and poor legislation with devastating effects on its economies and quality of life. I might sound dramatic, but if one takes into account that the digital divide is currently increasing at an exponential rate, it is not far-fetched to once again call us the “dark continent”.
Our primary source of international bandwidth is supplied by the very limited and slow satellite connection, which is also divided up by major operators such as Telkom Kenya. This leads to very low bandwidth actually reaching end users.This is not, however, what the rest of the world calls “broadband”.
True broadband is at least 4 megabits per second (Mbps) and is theoretically uncapped. True broadband is the ability to use the internet without taking the amount of consumption into account. US citizens use internet TV services like hulu instead of having to subscribe to hundreds of channels. Once we have this attitude we can call what we have in Kenya“broadband”. TEAMS might not be that enabler, but it sure does get us one step closer.
TEAMS will boost our bandwidth to 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps). This increase in bandwidth will theoretically make it much cheaper for service providers to buy wholesale bandwidth. These cost savings can then be passed on to the consumer and make it much cheaper to transfer large amounts of data.
Now it is important to remember that “cheaper” internet in Kenya does not mean that the base cost of having “fast” internet will suddenly drop to Ksh100. No, there are still businesses that are built up around a revenue model that relies on customers spending more than Ksh300 for example. If the price is suddenly Ksh50 for instance, those businesses will fold, regardless of how cheap bandwidth might be.
Instead, what we might see in Kenya over the next year (TEAMS goes live in about 3months) is a dramatic increase in the amount of “capped” data we can get for the same amount of money. A big problem currently is that networks in Kenya are currently unable to use all the extra bandwidth properly. Telkom Kenya for instance cannot easily jump above what it currently offers due poor quality cables and infrastructure. But Kplc, KDN and a few cellular operators have started investing in land-based fibre cable, right to the curb in some areas. This means that these players might be the first to actually be able to use the wave of extra bandwidth.Safaricom has also started to enable 7.2 Mbps HSDPA on its network, which theoretically means that if you wanted the fastest broadband line in Kenya, you have to go 3G.
So what does TEAMS mean for Kenyan end users in the near future? In my opinion, a few things will happen. First (the next 6 months) I believe networks will try to get maximum profits because bandwidth is suddenly cheap. This will lead to increasing pressure from end users, and then we can wait for an ISP to offer a “disruptive product” which will cause all subsequent offers from ISPs to drop tremendously in price. The fact of the matter is that ISPs in Kenya have always been used to low-profit margins and can easily adapt their businesses to once again operate on those margins once bandwidth is cheap. It will only take time.
This is an exciting time for communications in Kenya — we are in a perfect storm of situations which can contribute to a sudden reconnection to the world.
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