Introduction

The lack of adequate regional ICT infrastructure to support high-quality and high-speed Internet connection in Sub-Saharan Africa is recognised as a major obstacle for setting the region’s economic and social development in motion. But even for the moderate telecommunications infrastructure it employs, Africa pays an estimated US$400 million annually in routing of data traffic. Studies indicate that transmission capacity required to carry Africa’s international voice and data traffic is increasing – it increased by 91 percent in the three years to 2002 to 5.09 Gbps, with projections of a rise to 21.9 Gbps in 2008. This in effect means that Africa will increasingly need to pay more money in routing international traffic unless it can build a cheaper and more efficient international data carrier systems using undersea fibre optic cables.
The East African coast currently has no direct links to the international fibre optic network, which is one of the main reasons why the region’s connectivity is less reliable and costly. But this region is by no means the only one in Sub-Saharan Africa that is paying a high price for lacking a direct link to the international fibre optic system. Consequently, a number of initiatives are underway to create regional – and national - backbones, and some of these initiatives are private-public partnerships. The need for these regional backbones has been made even more urgent in light of the Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, adopted by the UN World Summit on the Information Society in November 2005, which asks multilateral institutions and bilateral public donors to consider providing more financial support for regional and large-scale national ICT infrastructure projects. Without access to affordable infrastructure, there will be little chance of building an information society.

As part of the global agenda to improve communications and data transfer technologies, SAT3, a high capacity optic fibre, was laid along the Western coast of Africa, from Morocco to South Africa. Similarly, a cable has been laid along the entire North African coast up to the Red Sea, with the exception of a small section between Tunisia and Libya. These regions accordingly have access to cheaper and more efficient communication with the rest of the world, than Eastern Africa does.

It costs much more to carry traffic over satellite than submarine cables, hence if operators in eastern and southern Africa switch to the submarine cable they will ideally be able to charge lower end-user prices. The East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) therefore seeks to link Eastern and parts of Southern Africa to the international fibre optic system, which will lower costs of connectivity especially of the consortium members and cut on the substantial amounts of money which operators in this region pay to foreign carriers for routing their traffic. But while the benefits of EASSy are in no doubt, consensus is yet to be reached among telecom operators, government bodies, development agencies and other stakeholders with regard to the model of financing and ownership of this cable system. The view of the World Bank (which is ready to provide loan financing to the cable system), as well as some other stakeholders, is that EASSy will deliver better value to users in Eastern and Southern Africa if it is built and run along the Open Access model, whereby even non-investors in the system can access it at rates comparable to those which investors in the system pay. This view is gaining momentum across the region, but the EASSy promoters prefer a consortium to own and control access to the marine cable by charging those that wish to access it a cost-plus-premium fee. Disagreement over this issue currently represents the biggest threat to the management and utilisation of EASSy, yet there are other challenges that must be overcome to ensure the success of this project.

This paper explores the Open Access debate and its applicability to regional backbone infrastructure initiatives like EASSy, while drawing comparisons to the SAT3 cable that was built on a club consortium model. The briefing sketches the history of EASSy and its progress so far, while highlighting similar regional initiatives on the continent that promise to improve access to low-cost bandwidth.

EASSy Background

EASSy was first articulated at the first East African Business Summit convened in Nairobi in November 2002 and attended by business leaders from Kenya,Tanzania and Uganda. The Summit’s mission was “to bring together a critical mass of the best business minds in our region to engage with key public sector players with a view to catalysing a true economic transformation of East Africa”. According to a “Business Manifesto” adopted at that summit, a fibre-optic maritime cable covering the eastern seaboard of Africa would be installed to benefit countries like Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, Mozambique and Zambia. Operators who would initiate the project and form the lead consortium were named as Telkom Kenya, Tanzania Telecommunications Company (TTCL), Uganda Telecom (UTL), Mobile Telephone Network (MTN Uganda), Zanzibar Telecom, Nation Media Group, and unspecified data operators.

It was envisaged in 2002 that EASSy would cost US$300 million and get completed by June 2005. The project was conceived to be private-sector-led, with public sector involvement and donor assistance. The fact that the Eastern Africa seaboard lacked a fibre optic cable system meant it had to rely exclusively on satellite links for voice and data transmission at about ten times the cost and at transmission speeds of less than a quarter those of fibre optic links. Unlike satellite-based telecommunication systems, fibre optic cables provide high quality broadband international connectivity and cost less to access and maintain. The cost of international data transfer via satellite was in September 2004 (the time the Third East African Business Summit took place) about US$5,000 per mega bit, compared with US$500 per mega bit with themaritime link. Further, while a satellite-hop to the UK took 650 microseconds, the fibre optic link took 150 microseconds.

The West African seaboard is served by SAT3/WASC (West African Submarine Cable) and Atlantis-2 cable systems, while the North African seaboard is served by Flag and Sae-Me-We systems. This makes the East African region exclusively reliant on satellite for communications,which makes Internet connectivity in the region more expensive and less efficient. EASSy will provide the last link to completely encircle Africa with a high capacity fibre optic telecommunications network.

This situation made East Africa one of the most “digitally excluded” regions of the world with just about 2% of the population connected to the Internet. Hence the proposed construction of the 9,900 km fibre optic system linking Mtunzini in South Africa to Port Sudan in Sudan was necessary to improve connectivity. The EASSy will connect to Madagascar, Northern and Southern African undersea fibre optic cable systems, and will have landing points at Mtunzini (South Africa), Maputo (Mozambique), Toliary (Madagascar), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Mombasa (Kenya), Mogadishu (Somalia), Djibouti (Republic of Djibouti) and Port Sudan (Sudan).

A number of international companies including Tyco of US, NEC and Fujitsu (Japan) and Alcatel (France), were invited to tender for the project. The project’s secretariat in Nairobi, Kenya, and the coordinators in Dublin, Ireland, said that tender evaluation had commenced and anticipated it would be completed in the early part of 2006.