Africa is one fifth of the world's land, an eighth of its population, yet it has less than one per cent of its Internet hosts. While more than three-quarters of its countries now have some form of Internet access, it seems most Africans won't experience cyberspace for a long, long time to come.
There are 123,660 hosts registered under African top-level domains (TLDs), according to last July's Internet Domain Survey by Network Wizards (www.nw.com). Mmore than 117,000 of these hosts are in South Africa, leaving the rest of Africa with one host per 120,000 people. By comparison, there are more than 33,000 hosts under Ireland's .ie TLD, one for every 110 people. (There are probably more hosts in both Africa and Ireland registered under other TLDs such as .com or .org. Even so, the contrast is still stark.)
According to Network Wizards, Egypt is Africa's second most wired country, with nearly 2,000 hosts; Morocco is third with just under 1,000. The least wired are Ethiopia, Gambia, Liberia, Mauritania, Malawi, Renunion and Sierra Leone, with none, although an expert on Internet connectivity in the continent, Mike Jensen of the Association of Progressive Communications (APC), disagrees: "There are 2,000 users in Ethiopia at least, Mauritania just came up, perhaps 50 users so far, Malawi probably has 500 at least, [and] Reunion is also up."
He adds that even the countries without online hosts have dialup store and forward systems. Forty of Africa's 55 countries have full, online access in their capitals, he says.
In the recent report Internet Connectivity For Africa Jensen says half of the remaining capitals have plans to go online, though seven have no plans at all. He also says only six countries have pervasive local dialup outside their capitals (Burkina Faso, Mauritius, Morocco, Senegal, South Africa and Zimbabwe).
APC says high telecommunications costs and small markets have lead to prohibitive Internet access charges. The report estimates the cost of a low-volume Internet account to be as high as $250 a month in some countries, putting the service out of reach of all but the top elite. These prices are expected to drop, but Internet access will still be restricted in many areas because three-quarters of Africans live outside major cities and have little access to phones. Although some African countries, including Botswana and Rwanda, have relatively advanced telecommunications networks, others like Mali, Niger and the former Zaire have only one telephone for every 1,000 people.
Efforts are being made to rectify this. Some countries, including Burkina Faso, Morocco, Senegal and Zimbabwe have established 1-800 type facilities, which will allow local-rate Internet access outside capital cities. Other countries are building community telecentres in remote areas, sort of village cyber-cafes where people get online. As elsewhere, the telephone companies are getting into the service provider industry, although in Africa they are hampered by a shortage of people with the necessary skills for managing Internet networks.
The cost of international links to the rest of the world and the lack of adequate backbones are major impediments. Some northeastern countries have access to the SEA-ME-WEA optic fibre cable connecting Asia and Europe, but most of the rest rely on satellite links. The cost of the links to the US and Europe are borne by the African ISPs, and APC says this "gives the developed country ISPs subsidised access to Africa's Internet and further increases the costs that ISPs in Africa must bear". Many of the international links within Africa are slow, analogue circuits, unsuitable for the multimedia nature of much of the Web.
Several large projects will improve Africa's telecoms infrastructure by the next decade. For example, AT&T's Africa One project will encircle the entire continent with an optical fibre "necklace", and South African Telekom plans to become an African hub, with a fibre link to Malaysia.
A consortium of African telcos, Rascom, is planning to launch its own satellite by 2001. Rascom also plans to double phone density from the current ITU estimate of one per 200 people by the year 2001, and plans to reduce the average distance to a phone from 50 to five kilometres. But this would still be an average - rural dwellers will still have little or no access to phones, let alone computers. At this rate it'll be a long, long time before most of Africa partakes in the information revolution.