Internet Users Ripped Off
by Western Companies
By Katy Salmon

African Internet users are being forced by Western companies to pay the full
cost of connecting to the World Wide Web, while European and American users
pay nothing. This is one of the main hurdles blamed for the slow spread of
the Internet in the world's poorest continent.
''This is exploitation. These networks are raping Africa of half a billion
dollars a year,'' says Richard Bell, chairperson of Kenya's Internet Service
Providers (ISP) Association.

When an ISP in Africa wants to connect to the Internet, they have to
purchase a link from Kenya to America to connect to the network over there.
When a Kenyan customer sends an email to a recipient in America, the email
travels by satellite to America and gets delivered to the recipient. The
largest cost of getting that email from its origination to its destination
is the cost of the satellite link from Kenya to America. The ISP in Kenya
pays for that link.

Conversely, when a subscriber of 'America On Line' sends an email to a
recipient in Kenya, the email will again travel to Kenya over the Kenyan
ISP's satellite link, for which Kenyan subscribers bear the cost. Thus, the
American subscribers send and receive email for free, whereas Kenyans have
to pay for both. International capacity in and out of Africa is estimated at
about gigabyte of traffic, at a cost of 10,000 U.S. dollars per month per
megabyte. These links are currently costing Africa more than 120 million
U.S. dollars a year. ''However, if Africa was utilising the bandwidth it
really requires, and which it would utilise if the cost of that bandwidth
wasn't so high, the latent requirement for bandwidth is easily ten times the
existing bandwidth,'' says Bell.

''In other words, the cost to Africa would be over a billion dollars a year,
of which 50 percent should be borne by the European and North American
networks, not by the African networks,'' he says. Asia suffered the same
problem until a few years ago. But because of the size of their economies,
they had sufficient volumes of traffic to be able to force that reversal for
commercial reasons.
An international backbone based in America who wanted a guaranteed quality
of service through to the Far East had to establish points of presence for
their network in the Far East or else face not being able to guarantee the
same quality of service there. ''The problem with Africa is that we do not
have those volumes of traffic. And a lot of our traffic even within Africa
is transiting through Europe and North America to get back to Africa again.
So the problem is compounded two fold,'' complains Bell.

This problem should soon be a thing of the past following the launch of the
Kenya Internet Exchange Point earlier this month. The aim is to ensure that
Kenyan traffic remains Kenyan. Similar national exchanges are being set up
in Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mozambique.
''We are also in the process of setting up the Pan African Virtual Internet
Exchange where the intention is to have direct interconnection between
countries in Africa. The aim is to regionalise the traffic to reduce the
overall costs,'' explains Bell. For example, traffic from Kenya to South
Africa, instead of both countries having to pay the full cost of an
international circuit to America, each would pay half the cost of a single
circuit between Kenya and South Africa.
Mike Jenson, who runs the Africa Interconnectivity web site, believes this
could make a significant difference. ''No one really knows how much
intra-African traffic there is, but it's sure to grow and become
significant. If only five percent is intra-regional, it would add up to a
sizeable amount,'' he says.

This could end the ''rape'' that Bell complains about. ''If we can get
enough traffic in Africa then maybe we can force some of these international
backbones to start establishing points of presence in Africa instead of
making us pay the full costs of going to their backbone or their nearest
point of presence in North America,'' he hopes. Even before that happens,
Bell believes that recent reforms will facilitate the take off of the
Internet in Kenya. ''I believe that the building blocks are now being put in
place, that Kenya will over the next 18 months see a huge explosion in
internet usage. During the course of 2001, there was a significant change in
the attitude and policies of the regulator, Communications Commission of
Kenya (CCK). ''Previously the regulator was very reluctant to change and to
move forward. If you look at the market structure from December 2001, it
actually has opened up an enormous number of different sections of the
market.
''I am convinced that CCK's attitude has changed and it now wants Kenya to
be the number one Information Communication Technology market in Africa,''
Bell says.

Despite the CCK's new-found passion for the Internet, there are some issues
it cannot tackle, such as the much-desired privatisation of the state-owned
Telkom Kenya. Intense pressure from donors has not even managed to force the
government to sell one of its favoured cash cows. ''Telkom is the biggest
obstacle to the development of the Internet in Kenya,'' says Rita Gitobu of
Kenyan ISP 'Wananchi On Line'. ''Getting lease lines from them is very
hard,'' she charges.

Another long-standing gripe is Telkom's monopoly with its Jambonet
international Internet backbone, which connects Kenya to the rest of the
world. This monopoly is supposed to last until 2004. The new exchange point
means that local traffic can now bypass Jambonet, but it is still the only
option for international traffic. Bell hopes this situation will change
soon. ''We are confident that we will succeed in breaking the Jambonet
monopoly, hopefully before the end of the year,'' he says. The December 2001
Market Structure -- a CCK document -- has a significant change in wording
from previous ones. It says that Jambonet has the monopoly until 2004
depending on performance.

''And it performs very badly,'' says Bell. ''Our association has written to
the regulator and requested the regulator to commission an independent study
of the performance of Jambonet.''
''We are confident the independent study will demonstrate what we have been
saying for the last two to three years, that the performance is not as good
as is required.'' When that happen, CCK will be in a position to issue an
additional licence for a second backbone before 2004.
''Whereas it doesn't appear at the moment for the consumer that a lot has
changed, actually behind the scenes a lot of things have already changed and
will continue to change,'' promises Bell. There are an estimated 100,000
subscribers in Kenya and four million across the continent.

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