Current estimates put the number of Internet users in Africa at about one million people.Most of these are in South Africa (about 850,000-900,000) leaving only about one hundred and fifty thousand** amongst the remaining 750 million people on the sub-continent. This works out at about one Internet user for every 5,000 people (excluding South Africa, and one per 9 000 when North Africa is excluded). This compares with a world average of about one user for every 38 people and in North America and Europe, the figure for Internet use is about one in every 4-6 people. There are now about 24 countries on the continent with over 1000 users but only about 10 countries with over 3000 (Egypt, Morocco, Kenya, Ghana, Mozambique, South Africa, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe). South Africa's Internet community is 30 times larger than any other in Africa, being among the top 20 countries in the world when ranked by number of Internet nodes.

The Internet has continued its rapid growth in the region over the last year and only three African countries remained without local access by the end of 1998 - Eritrea, Libya and Somalia. Both Eritrea and Libya are expected to establish Internet facilities in early 1999, leaving Somalia to be one of the very last nations on earth without local coverage.

However, Internet services are still largely confined to the capitals and major towns. This does not provide local access for most of the population, 70-80% of whom reside in rural areas. To address this situation some countries have made the decision to provide local call Internet access across the whole country. So far 10 countries have adopted this policy – Burkina Faso, Gabon, Malawi, Mauritius, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tchad, Tunisia and Zimbabwe. The service is supplied by the local telecom operator which sets up a special area-code for Internet access providers that is charged at local call tariffs, allowing Internet providers to immediately roll out a network with national coverage.

Reflecting the increasing numbers of subscribers outside the capital cities, a growing number of countries (Angola, Benin, Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia and Zimbabwe) have POPs in some of the secondary towns, and South Africa has POPs in about 70 locations. Nevertheless, limited coverage still means that for most people it is prohibitively expensive to use the network for anything but important email, especially where local calls cost over US$10 an hour.

Most African capitals have more than one ISP and in late 1998 there were almost 400 ISPs across the region (300 excluding South Africa). Six countries had more than 10 ISPs (see table) but 14 countries still have only one ISP. The total number of computers connected to the Internet in the region, excluding South Africa, was estimated by Network Wizards at around 8,000 in mid 1998 (up from 290 in 1995), but the figure may be closer to 9,000 or 10,000 due to the measurement technique which does not count hosts which are not fully referenced in domain name servers. In any event this represents about 20 hosts per 100,000 people, compared to a world average of 605 per 100,000 and a high income country average of over 3,000.

The average obscures the impact of the high density in North and South Africa, which if excluded, reduces the total to less than 1 host per 100,000 people. In addition, Internet growth worldwide has been so rapid (12 percent per month), that the region’s share of hosts has fallen over the last year. Africa’s share of Internet host sites world-wide was only 0.025 percent in 1997, and fell to 0.022 percent by the beginning of 1998. Excluding South Africa, the sub-Saharan region has about as many Internet sites as Latvia with its population of 2.5 million.

The opening up of the Nigerian Internet market will be likely to change the picture as the national telecom operator (Nitel) has big plans to provide Internet countrywide. With a fifth of the continent’s population, Nigeria has been one of the slumbering giants of the African Internet world which until mid ‘98 only had a few dialup email providers and a couple of full ISPs operating on very low bandwidth links. Only a few users were able to afford the $130,000 a year for an international 9.6Kbps leased line. Nitel has now established a POP in Lagos with a 1MB link to Global One in the US and plans to put POPs in 3 other cities by early next year. The telecom regulator has recently licensed 38 ISPs to resell the service and about 12 are currently active.

The high speed with which most African public telecom operators (PTOs) have established Internet services is noteworthy. In the last three years PTOs have brought full Internet services on stream in 31 countries and similar moves are afoot in two others (Liberia and Tanzania). This follows trends in the developed countries where almost all of the PTOs have established Internet services.In many Francophone countries the PTO operates the major value added service provider as a joint venture with France Cable and Radio, usually called TelecomPlus.

In most cases the PTOs only operate the international gateway and leave the resale of end-user Internet access to the private sector. In a few countries the PTO operates the gateway in competition with the private sector, namely Côte d ’Ivoire, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa and Zambia.

Currently the only countries where the PTO is not currently supplying services are Liberia, Ghana, DRC, Uganda, and Namibia. The use of shared international links is having a significant positive impact on the cost and accessibility of the Internet in some countries, given the much larger economies of scale that the PTOs can apply to the provision of the services. However this has been off-set in other countries which have not adopted cost-based tariffing of the service or have lacked the commitment and technical skills to manage the service efficiently.

While Ethiopia and Mauritius are the only countries where the PTOs have officially adopted the position of ‘sole supplier’ of Internet services (i.e. where private companies are barred from reselling Internet services), there are other countries where this practice still continues, predominantly in the Sahel sub-region – Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Niger, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan and Tchad.

The bulk of the service providers are small businesses, often started by technicians who learned the skills at university and who find a local entrepreneur to partner with. Some national ISPs are operated by Universities (such as ZamNet) and others have been established by larger companies, mostly those already associated with the IT industry.

As far as the multinational ISPs are concerned, AfricaOnline, now a subsidiary of UK-based Africa Lakes (http://www.africa online.com) is the largest operation. The group is consolidating its year of growth which saw local branches open in Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe, adding to its stable in Ghana, Kenya, and Côte d ’Ivoire. The other three multinational ISPs which operate subsidiaries or franchises in the region are UUNET, (in South Africa, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Namibia) and Swift Global (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda).

Due to high tariffs and lack of capacity, obtaining sufficient international bandwidth for carrying out interactive activities over the Internet is still a major problem in most countries. The subcontinent excluding South Africa has only 2 percent of the world ’s international telecom circuits – about 16,000. As a result many Internet sites are hosted on servers that are in Europe or the U.S. This is especially necessary in countries where ISPs operate their own independent international links without local interconnections (peering), such as in Kenya and Tanzania, which means that traffic between the subscribers of two ISPs in the same city must travel to the US or Europe and back.

Until last year, few of the countries outside of South Africa and North Africa had international Internet links larger than 64Kbps, but 128Kps connections have become in- creasingly common. More than 256Kbps of international bandwidth is currently only present in Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Namibia, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Tunisia. Excluding South Africa, the total international Internet bandwidth is about 25Mbps. The only countries with links of over 1Mbps are Egypt, Kenya, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, which has about 60Mbps.

Most of the international connections in Africa are carried via satellite. The exceptions to this are the marine optic fibre link from South Africa to the cross-Atlantic hub in the Canaries, and Djibouti which has access to the SEA-ME-WEA cable. Also, the countries with borders shared with South Africa benefit from the low tariff policies instituted by the South African telecom operator for neighbouring countries which means these have lower cost terrestrial links, resulting in most of the ISPs in the neighbouring countries connecting to the South African Internet infrastructure. The exceptions to this are Botswana, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.

By far the majority of international Internet circuits in the region connect to the USA, with a few to the United Kingdom, Italy and France. The major international Internet suppliers are AT&T, BT, Global One/Sprint, UUNET/AlterNet, MCI, NSN, BBN, Teleglobe, Verio and France Telecom/FCR.A number of other links are provided by PanamSat and Intelsat direct to private groundstations in the US and UK, circumventing local PTO infrastructure.

Generally ISPs must pay the entire cost of the connection to Europe or the US, which effectively gives the developed country users free access to the continent’s network, further increasing the already high costs that ISPs in Africa must bear. There are efforts being made by members of the Internet community in Africa to raise the issue in international fora and to partner with other similar efforts such as Singapore and Australia’s major telecommunication operator Telstra, which is also opposing this same imbalance in Asia.

Aside from South Africa, which acts as a hub to link some of its neighbouring countries as mentioned earlier, there are no other regional backbones or links between neighbouring countries, which means that most traffic between African neighbours must travel via expensive satellite circuits to the US or Europe and back to Africa again.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) has now taken over administration of Internet IP Address space for Africa (along with North America, South America, and the Caribbean). This means that address space is no longer free and until a local African Registry can be set up, networks will now be required to pay ARIN USD$2,500 per year to obtain a Class-C address. A proposal for an Africa Network Information Centre (NIC) has been discussed for some years but little progress has been made, partly because of the lack of on-the-ground national networking associations to support it and the political difficulties of identifying the appropriate host country and organisation to operate it. However significant momentum is building up for the resolution of the issue as there are now local Internet Society chapters in all of the African regions and in most of the countries with large Internet user populations (see http://www.afrinic.org).

Reflecting the high telecommunication costs and the small markets, often supplied by a single operator, ISP charges for dialup access are generally higher in Africa than elsewhere. Currently, the average cost of using the Internet for 5 hours a month in Africa is about $60/month. This contrasts with figures of the Organization for Eco- nomic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which estimated recently that 20 hours of Internet access in the U.S. costs $29, including phone and provider fees. Although European charges are more ($74 in Germany, $52 in France, $65 in Britain, and $53 in Italy) all of these countries have per capita incomes which are 10-100 times greater than the African average.

However monthly ISP dialup charges in Africa do vary greatly – between $10 and $100 a month, largely reflecting the immaturity of the markets, the varying tariff policies of the PTOs and the different national policies on access to international telecommunications bandwidth. The World Bank estimates that telecommunications costs for local and international circuits often constitute about half of an ISPs operating costs. One of the problems is that international leased line tariffs are up to 5 times higher than rates available from alternative providers to the monopoly PTOs.

In response to the high cost of full Internet based services, and also because of the overriding importance of electronic mail, email-only store and forward services are generally continuing to attract subscribers. There is also growing interest in telecentres, kiosks, cybercafes and other forms of public Internet access such as adding PCs to community phone-shops, schools, police stations and clinics which can share the cost of equipment access amongst a larger number of users.

There have been few attempts to establish email-to-fax gateways in Africa despite the apparent need, given the low penetration of the Internet. Currently the co-operative project known as the Experiment in Remote Printing (TPC) only has two African countries among the 27 in its coverage list – South Africa and Botswana (http://www.tpc.int). Likewise, none of the commercial services have local delivery facilities out-side of South Africa.

Voice over IP services are not officially available anywhere in the region, and none of the telecom operators have implemented voice over IP technology for their internal traffic. The closest example is Egypt Telecom which is routing some of its existing voice traffic to the US over IP.

In the area of local content development, the African web-space is expanding rapidly and almost all countries have some form of local or internationally hosted web server unofficially or officially representing the country with varying degrees comprehensiveness. However, still relatively few institutions are well represented on the Web. While increasing numbers of organisations have a Web site with basic content and descriptive information, many are hosted by international development agency sites and very few sites actually use the Web for their activities.

Surprisingly, it can be observed that the French speaking countries have a far higher profile on the Web and greater institutional connectivity than the non-French speaking countries. This is due to the strong assistance provided by the various Francophone support agencies and the Canadian and French governments which are concerned with the dominance of English on the Internet. As a result, the Anglophone and Luso phone countries have considerable ‘catching up’ to do to reach the same levels of connectivity and representation on the Web. ACCT’s BIEF and AUPELF-UREF/REFER ’s Syfed Centres, which are building Web sites of local information as well as providing access, are the two dominant content developers.

On a sub-regional basis, Southern Africa is the most advanced region in terms of their use of ICTs, followed by North Africa, East and West Africa, with Central Africa lagging furthest behind.

There are about 120 electronic mailing lists and UseNet newsgroups on the Internet (almost entirely hosted off-continent) which discuss issues related to Africa. There is a list for almost every nation as well as others on more general topics ranging from African Cinema to Post Colonialism.

Two web search engines specialising on Africa have emerged over the last year - Woyaa and Orientation Africa. As with other similar services elsewhere, these are run by commercial companies which generate revenue through advertising. Orientation is run by Hong Kong based Black Box and Woyaa by a UK company.

Author - Mike Jensen -mikej@sn.opc.org

**The definition of a ‘user’ or ‘subscriber’ may varies. The number of accounts being shared in Africa may be much greater than in more developed regions. A recent study by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) found on average that each computer with an Internet or email connection supported three users – this could push the number of email users outside South Africa to over 400 000.

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