[Chapter-delegates] IMAGINE Africa mailing list

[Franck Martin]

Africa is well covered by satellites. I wonder how this service compares
to commercial offerings. In the Pacific Islands we have very little
satellite coverage. SPC a regional organisation is working on a project
called RICS (Rural Information Communication System). You can see some
announcement on our web site www.picisoc.org.

The problem of pushing projects from the outside is a recurring theme,
in many projects, and I could nearly write a book about AID money. The
last visible one is OLPC.

There is no easy solution, nor any miracle recipie. It all goes down to
capacity building and education of the people there, so they can think
and do themselves these projects as a commercial venture (or not).

Fred Baker wrote:
> Thanks for the pointer. I have taken the liberty of forwarding it to  
> folks within Cisco that build space-based networks or are  
> collaborating with African networking interests; some of them are  
> likely to take an interest in the project.
>
> There are a number of folks looking at interconnecting Africa in  
> various ways. Much of Africa today uses satellite communications,  
> often C band in equatorial areas and Ku/Ka band north of +5 degrees  
> and south of -5 degrees. There are several suboceanic cables down the  
> west coast and in places on the east coast; cable consortia like  
> EASSY are trying to complete that circle, and companies like Egypt  
> Telecom are driving fiber into the interior to places that make sense  
> to them. The big reason people don't use the suboceanic cables has to  
> do with the prices their owners charge; a quick review on the web  
> will reveal a level of finger-pointing around that which is simply  
> breathtaking. There are at least two sets of folks trying to build  
> educational networks, and are asking companies like mine for  
> donations of ten gigabit backbone equipment. The "global" solution  
> discussed five minutes into the talk by the University of Michigan  
> student looks a lot like what Teledesic wanted to deploy commercially  
> about a decade ago. She's right; it didn't get deployed for a list of  
> reasons one of which is economic.
>
> The big issues are money and power, and the reason those are issues  
> come down to some combination of "there isn't any", "regulatory  
> issues", and "that which exists is poorly managed, so that even if  
> there is some, there isn't any that is within reach of those who  
> would like to lease/buy it." There are strong political issues; MTN,  
> national telecoms, and companies like them have little incentive to  
> help a competitor get going, and that is how they perceive these  
> networks. There is also the issue of business and technical with-its  
> necessary to operate the network; expertise exists in Africa, but  
> nowhere near as much as in other parts of the world.
>
> A strategic comment... there are any number of projects that have  
> happened in Africa where some well-meaning westerner plunked down  
> investment and made something happen. When the westerner leaves, in  
> many cases the project falls into disuse or mismanagement and  
> eventually falls apart. It's part of the syndrome I relate to  
> neocolonialism; if colonial powers kept their colonies helpless and  
> neocolonial powers kept it that way - and it can be easily argued  
> that some have done that - african former colonies also are guilty of  
> remaining unnecessarily helpless when they could do otherwise. What  
> you Really Want To Do is find someone in Africa who wants to do this  
> as part of a larger project, and make them successful; having done  
> that, you leave behind someone who thinks it was at least in part his/ 
> her idea and has a strong incentive to keep it alive and useful.
>
> On Apr 28, 2008, at 2:33 PM, WWWhatsup wrote:
>
>   
>

-- 
Franck Martin
ICT Specialist
franck at sopac.org
SOPAC, Fiji
GPG Key fingerprint = 44A4 8AE4 392A 3B92 FDF9  D9C6 BE79 9E60 81D9 1320
"Toute connaissance est une reponse a une question" G.Bachelard

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