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The Global Growth of Broadband

It seems that Africa is now connected to the Global Broadband network via a sub sea fibre optic cable – this lead to the BBC publishing a model which makes interesting viewing. It shows how the Internet had evolved since 1999. You can see how the density of broadband subscribers has increased over time and also how the international interconnect circuits have improved. According to the model West Africa has been connected since 2004 with the West coast being connected this year.

This caused me to reflect on my own trips to Botswana in the late 90’s when I setup an email system there which connected to the UK via initially a modem ( dial-up ) link and and subsequently via the government network and a satellite link. The former was 9.6 bps on a good day and the latter over a shared 256kbps which was of course much better.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8255695.stm

The following article provide some additional background to the linking of Africa by means of this new sub sea link.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8257152.stm

And a blog post about the experience of using the new infrastructure to do live video broadcast!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/09/live_from_mombasa.html