1. International Telecommunication Union HIPSSA Project Support for Harmonization of the ICT Policies in Sub-Sahara Africa Measurement of the impacts of the arrival of submarine cables in Africa Isabelle Gross – Balancing Act

2. 2 Table of contents Introduction Abundance of capacity Falling wholesale prices of international capacity Redundancy Whats the picture at the retail level?

3. 3 Introduction: Safaricoms data subscribers and penetration rate

4. 4 Abundance of capacity - several countries with access to 3 and up 5 submarine cables - Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, SA - overcapacity??? Maybe - next challenge for many African countries is to bring the capacity inland (e.g.Liberia, Sierra Leone, etc..) = dense and redundant national backbones

5. 5 Abundance of capacity … … and reinforce cross-border terrestrial connections Examples on next 2 slides: * Phase 3 Telecom in West Africa (network that is planned to span through Nigeria, Benin, Niger and Togo * Liquid Telecom: Owned by Econet in Zimbabwe, its network currently covers Zimbabwe and reaches into South Africa, into Botswana and into Zambia.

6. 6

7. 7 Liquid Telecoms cross border terrestrial fibre network

8. 8 Falling wholesale prices of international capacity - in particular in countries where there are now 2/3 submarine cables (but not necessarily the case in countries where there will be only 1 cable = need for regulation) - prices are as low as US$100 per Mb at STM1 level or even lower (3 years ago in Nigeria 1MB was US$2000/3000 while today it is US$100) - prices will fall further (ACE+WACS) - Ask participants what has happen in their country?

9. 9 Falling wholesale prices of international capacity the next challenge… … - bring international capacity at an affordable price to landlocked countries - transit costs too high in comparison to international capacity: 3 to 4 times more and sometimes up to 10 times more

10. 10 Redundancy more and more African countries have now more than 1 exit route but still some African countries left with one single exit route (Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc) improved quality of services with less downtime (in theory 100% uptime but they have still been long outage on the East as well as on the West Coast – the case of Benin and its impact on neighbouring countries)

11. 11 Redundancy more and more African countries have now more than 1 exit route but still some African countries left with one single exit route (Sierra Leone, Liberia, etc) improved quality of services with less downtime (a theory but they still have long outage on the East as well on the West Coast – the base of Benin and its impact for neighbouring countries)

12. 12 Whats the picture at the retail level? retail prices have come down but less than expected: more bandwidth offered to customers but not necessarily cheaper but prices are coming down encourage the development of wider range of data offerings: take up of mobile data services (South Africa, Kenya, etc…) encourage the development of content, value added services, e-government applications and services

13. 13 Whats the picture at the retail level? The challenge is to get data services in less populated and rural areas - not necessarily a profitable business and - will need some sort of public funding

14. 14 What possible market dynamic for data services? Whats the picture at the retail level?

15. 15 Thanks a lot for your attention Union Internationale des Télécommunications International Telecommunication Union