Undersea Cables

As in 2022, Google and Meta dominate the undersea cable new headlines with the 2africa and Equiano cables. Equiano went live in several countries in 2023 and the 2africa cable, although not yet operational, was successfully landed in many African countries and is scheduled to go live in 2024. Other regional cable systems went live including the Liquid-funded T3 cable connecting South Africa with Mauritius. Plans for even more regional cables emerged including the:

• Amilcar Cabral cable connecting Cape Verde, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone;
• MEDUSA cable connecting Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt with European countries; and,
• West Africa cable that will connect Maroc Telecom and its partners in Côte d’Ivoire, Togo, Benin, Gabon, and Mauritania with Europe.

It is hard to be sure of an undersea cable until it actually goes live. The SHARE cable, supported by the Senegalese government, which promised to connect Senegal and Cape Verde was much in the news in 2022 but completely absent in 2023. I see no reason why it wouldn’t proceed but the absence of news is curious.

2014

Turning the clock back 10 years takes us to a time when the first major wave of investments in undersea cables was coming to an end with several projects not making it beyond their fundraising PowerPoint presentations and others like the EASSy cable more than doubling their capacity from 4.7Tbps to 10Tbps. That seemed incredible at the time but pales in comparison to 2africa and Equiano, each of which which together represent a design capacity of 320Tbps. The arrival of Internet giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft and others into the world of submarine cables represents the single biggest shift in the last 10 years, bringing much needed investment resources but also shifting the power balance. Combined with geopolitical issues now clouding the undersea landscape, undersea cable landings have become a much more complex issue. African governments now must weigh issues of political alignment and digital colonialism when considering landing station agreements.

Terrestrial Backbone Fibre

If the number of news articles on terrestrial fibre projects this year is anything to go by (nearly twice as many as last year) this is a boom year for investment. Notable is the continued rise of regional infrastructure providers including Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Paratus, and MTN wholesale operator spin-off Bayobab. I should probably include Orange in that list but they are typically less public in their dealings making them harder to assess.

2014

According to AfricaBandwidthMaps, in 2014, 371 million Africans lived with 25km of a fibre optic point of presence. In 2021, that figure reached 669 million and it is likely now more than double the original figure from 2014. That represents about 1.2 million kilometres of terrestrial fibre as of June 2022.

The one thing that hasn’t changed substantially since 2014 is that utilisation of terrestrial fibre capacity remains comparatively low, which can be attributed to the fact that prices for terrestrial fibre generally remain high. Private operators tend to extract whatever the market will bear and state-owned networks are often beholden to loan repayments and resist lowering costs. I have argued that a low, geographically flat rate on wholesale fibre access would actually lead to greater revenues for operators but the economics of scarcity continue to dominate. A notable exception is the Ugandan government which has taken deliberate steps to lower costs on their state-owned backbone. Also worth mentioning is Anambra State in Nigeria which has taken the bold step of cutting Rights of Way charges, the cost to operators to deploy fibre across private/public property, to zero.

A little more pricing transparency would go a long way. Little has been done to benchmark fibre pricing in the region. Regulators might consider asking fibre network operators to publish a basic rate card as the regulator in Botswana does, at least occasionally, for their state-owned fibre network.

Fibre To The Home and OTT

Most major operators now offer FTTH services in larger cities in Africa. While the investment cost is higher than wireless technologies, the absence of upfront or ongoing spectrum fees balances out that equation to some degree. There is also the fact that fibre technologies have a longer lifespan than wireless and are much higher in overall capacity, as well as being readily upgradeable. This makes fibre an attractive investment for any operator that can afford the initial capital outlay. FTTH (along with Fixed Wireless Access – FWA) is changing the landscape of African telecommunications, which has historically been almost entirely dependent on mobile communication technologies. Now we see two types of services: mobile broadband which is typically capped and FTTH / FWA services offering uncapped broadband to homes and businesses. The capped versus uncapped distinction is not by definition but it does seem to be how the market is playing out. Demand for uncapped services is largely driven by a range of OTT streaming services from social media giants and online movie/television streaming services.

OTT news in 2023 revealed a sector in the midst of change. The massive growth of OTT as a means of media delivery has some African governments contemplating whether they should be taxed. In Nigeria, streaming veteran iRoko has had to reinvent itself, pivoting away from its African audience to more global integration with smart TV services. Meanwhile, new players are entering the market. South Africa’s Multichoice is taking another run at the streaming market with ShowMax 2.0. A group of French footballers are backing a platform called StarNews Africa in six West African Countries. And the Ethiopian News Agency announced plans to launch pan-African media platform.

This makes for a complex time. OTT services are gaining ground over more traditional media delivery platforms including satellite. Broadcasters are racing to adapt to the new reality. Meanwhile, giants like Netflix who, to their credit, have invested substantially in the development of African movies and television shows are seen with mixed feelings by African operators lamenting lost revenues and governments concerned about the disproportionate influence of international media platforms.

2014

All this has happened in the space of 10 years. 2014 was the year that FTTH really began to take off. Frustrated with ADSL speeds, a neighbourhood association in a Johannesburg suburb banded home-owners together to solicit a tender for FTTH services. This triggered a tidal wave of FTTH competition in South Africa which continues to lead the continent. Elsewhere Liquid Telecom (now Liquid Intelligent Technologies) announced FTTH roll-outs across Eastern and Southern Africa. In Kampala, Uganda, Project Link, a pioneering wholesale metro fibre initiative (sponsored by Google) had just launched. Now known as CSquared, it operates in Uganda, Ghana, Liberia, and Togo.

Netflix didn’t officially launch in African countries until 2016 but YouTube and other streaming media services were popular long before that.

Licensed Spectrum

If news stories on radio spectrum licensing are anything to go by, 2023 might be called the year of 5G with operators across the continent announcing 5G launches and deployments. Namibia and Uganda successfully auctioned off 5G frequencies. It is worth looking at what these 5G launches really mean though. To the average user, 5G’s advantages over 4G is much less profound than previous 3GPP generational changes. As long as networks are not oversaturated, 4G offers adequate speeds for the majority of broadband users.

Given that anyone wishing to use a 5G service would have to purchase a new phone that supports 5G frequencies, it may be hard to see the value proposition over 4G for the average consumer. It is not surprising then that many operators have chosen to implement their 5G frequencies using Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) technologies. FWA involves the use of Point to MultiPoint wireless technology that directs communication to fixed devices at users’ homes and business, where they would then access 5G locally via WiFi. This is an extremely valuable service but it represents a very different kind of service from blanket mobile access networks. And yet 5G continues to be hyped in ways that are hard to credit. Consider this excerpt from coverage of a 5G launch in Nigeria this last year.

“While we may think that 4G is a remarkable improvement in our internet experiences, 5G completely opens a new vista where anything and everything is possible. Right now, with 5G, we can only be limited by the limits of our imagination. 5G ushers in a new era of collaboration that breaks boundaries and presents a new wave of economic benefits for this generation and the next, and we cannot wait to see how young people all over the country explore this new world of instant and unbroken connections to unleash a revolution in creativity.”

ITWeb Africa – Airtel launches 5G network in Nigeria – 20 Jun 2023

This kind of disingenuous hyperbole is intended to help drive adoption but is frankly unhelpful to anyone. It is great to see spectrum becoming available for 5G but, equally important are 4G deployments which have become dramatically less expensive as the technology has matured. Policy makers and regulators should be thinking about spectrum from the point of view of inclusion and affordability as much as from the point of view of competition.

Notable by its absence in African countries has been the introduction of licensing frameworks for private 4G/5G networks, offering access to 5G spectrum on a more localised basis. Regulation for private networks has been spreading around the world but African regulators have been slow to consider it, perhaps out of concern at potentially undermining revenues from national 5G spectrum licenses. An exception here is South Africa which launched a consultation on ‘Dynamic Spectrum Access and Opportunistic Spectrum Management’ in 2023.

2014

Turning the clock back 10 years and we see LTE were going through a period of strong early growth with twice as many LTE networks launched in 2014 as the year before. Looking back, I see that I made similar comments about LTE and the affordability of LTE smartphones in 2014 as in my comments about 5G and handset affordability above. Perhaps affordable 5G handsets are just around the corner.

Unlicensed and Dynamic Spectrum

WiFi continues to be the technology that keeps on giving with every successive generation of WiFi offering greater and greater performance and ease of deployment while remaining remarkably inexpensive. The affordability of this technology and its license-exempt nature have made it a natural choice for governments, startups, and communities to choice to deploy as an affordable access solution.

As in 2022, 2023 saw several governments announce free-WiFi access initiative, including Uganda, Tanzania, South Africa, and Kenya. There have been many free-WiFi initiatives over the years but not much has been said about their sustainability. WiFi networks need proper maintenance and access to backhaul broadband. It is not always obvious how free-WiFi initiatives are intended to be sustained.

In some cases free-WiFi networks are the result of corporate sponsorship such as this planned network of 4000 WiFi hotspots being rolled out by Coca Cola in Kenya. In other cases, operators are attempting to sustain free-WiFi through an advertising model. ThinkWiFi (which took over Google Station’s network when they abandoned ship in 2020) has just launched an ad-driven WiFi network in Kenya. Whether an ad-driven free-WiFi network can sustain itself remains to be seen. A 2017 study by Caribou Digital investigated the question but did not reach a definitive conclusion.

As for dynamic spectrum / TVWS spectrum, there was little to report in 2023 except that South Korea donated some TVWS equipment to South Africa and Makarere University in Uganda carried out a small deployment in the district of Apac.

2014

Ten years ago, WiFi was still struggling for legitimacy as an access technology in many African countries. In countries like Zimbabwe and Namibia, WiFi was restricted from commercial use without a license. In Malawi, the annual device fee was almost as much as the cost of the equipment itself. Public WiFi initiatives were just getting off ground:

• In South Africa, a freemium public WiFi initiative called Project Isiswe had just launched;
• Rwanda had deployed some public WiFi hotspots as part of its Smart Kigali initiative; and,
• Kenya was struggling with some initial government-funded WiFi deployments in Nakuru.

Meanwhile, hopes were high among TVWS pioneers with both Microsoft and Google supporting TVWS pilots across the continent although formal regulations to permit TVWS use were proving elusive. Mawingu, a thriving rural wireless ISP in Kenya, got its start as a TVWS operator but abandoned it for WiFi when regulations were not forthcoming.

Towers

It is increasingly rare for a mobile network operator to own and operate its own towers. Orange is a notable holdout but it said to be considering the sale of its tower portfolio. A small number of tower companies dominate the landscape including American Tower Corporation (ATC), IHS Towers, Helios Towers, and relative newcomer EastCastle. Tower outsourcing makes sense from the point of view of infrastructure sharing in that tower companies are incentivised to offer tower access to multiple operators which should lead to cost-savings. However, very little detail seems to make it into the public domain regarding the actual level of infrastructure sharing that goes on with tower companies.

2014

Tower outsourcing was already happening in 2014 but I wasn’t paying much attention to it. I didn’t grasp its importance at the time.

Datacentres

For fibre network operators, both undersea and terrestrial, data centres are a natural extension of their business model. 2023 saw many fibre operators, including Liquid, Paratus, MainOne, Angola Cables, and Orange announce new data centres. Alongside fibre operators, independent datacentre companies appear to be flourishing. Africa Data Centres (ADC), Open Access Data Centres (OADC), Wingu Africa, Raxio, iColo, and Teraco all announced datacentre projects across the continent in 2023. The distinction between fibre operators and independent datacentre companies is a little bit fuzzy however. For example, ADC are owned by Liquid and WIOCC is a major shareholder in OADC. The map of independent companies is made more complex as datacentre giants like Digital Realty have acquired Teraco and iColo and Equinix has acquired MainOne. In short, datacentres in Africa are both expanding and consolidating rapidly in the face of growing demand and international investment, with South Africa leading the way. Of the 121 datacentres across the continent, 55 are in South Africa, according to this article.

To build a proper picture of internet infrastructure in Africa, it would be lovely to have an integrated map of terrestrial fibre networks together with a map of IXPs, CDNs and datacentres.

2014

Ten years ago, carrier neutral datacentres were in their infancy on the continent. While some national operators had their own in-house data facilities, they were not what one would now think of as a commercial datacentre. Pioneers included South Africa’s Teraco, which opened its first datacentre in 2010 and Kenya Data Centres (now Africa Data Centres) which launched in 2011 in Kenya.

Satellite

One operator completely dominated African satellite news in 2023: Starlink. It seemed that every week brought a new story of Starlink being licensed in country after country (or not licensed as the case may be). Ministers declared 100% broadband coverage and happily toured SpaceX / Starlink facilities. I have set out my own thoughts on the potential impact of Starlink and don’t need to repeat them here. Suffice to say that LEO satellite constellations are a new player in the access space and Starlink is a clear front runner. OneWeb completed its constellation in 2023 and was expected begin operations in late in the year but appears to be delayed, at least in Africa.

Many other interesting things were happening in the satellite world that did not, perhaps, receive the attention they deserved. HTS satellite broadband services expanded across the continent. YahClick began offering broadband services in Nigeria and South Sudan. Eutelsat partnered with Blueline in Madagascar to offer affordable satellite broadband. Angola launched its own satellite (Angosat-2) to connect more than 150 locations across the country. Gilat partnered with Ethio Telecom to modernise their satellite services. Both Tanzania and Cameroon announced their space satellite ambitions in 2023.

2014

In 2014, satellite broadband was only for the wealthy as most existing satellite offerings on the continent were not designed for broadband. Newer generation High Throughput Satellites were just coming online. HTS pioneer YahSat was available in a few African countries. Middle Earth Orbit (MEO) constellation O3B went operational in September of 2014 but was only financially practical as backhaul for operators in remote areas.

Miscellaneous

With over a hundred articles that fell in to the miscellaneous category this year it is hard to choose what to single out. I think if there is one thing I would focus on it is the evolving relationship between the internet giants and Africa. Companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon have brought connectivity, technology and investment to African countries. Often they have shaken up slower moving operators and spurred innovation. However, these companies have grown in size and dominance and are obviously in the business of serving their shareholders. African countries have begun to reconsider their relationship to Silicon Valley. Whether it is the Ugandan government introducing taxes on foreign tech firms or workers taking Meta, Uber, and OpenAI to court for unfair labour practices, Africans are beginning to evaluate and redefine their relationship to these companies.

As with last year, I feel compelled to single out the stealth success of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) operators like Africa Mobile Networks (AMN), NuRAN, and Vanu who continue to grow in rural service delivery: Vanu in Liberia; NuRAN in Madagascar, Cameroon, and DRC; and AMN also in Madagascar.

All in all, telecom sector in Africa seems to have gad a very good year. From a competition perspective, it is encouraging to watch an ever growing shift from monolithic competition between mobile network operators to a wider and wider range of technologies and business models.

—
This work would not have been possible without the ongoing support of the Mozilla Corporation, the Association for Progressive Communications, and the Network Startup Resource Center.

For those of us with access to the internet, it is a marvel. In spite of the trolling, doom-scrolling, fake news, and social media self-absorption, it is still a magnificent tool for human communication and collaboration. From reading research papers to repairing tools to talking with colleagues across the world, it is all accessible in seconds via the internet. It’s as if internet access gives us superpowers. We can find our way in strange cities, watch the surf roll in on a distant shore, transport ourselves into a virtual classroom. And as resources and services grow on the internet, so do our super powers. 

The unfortunate corollary is that those without affordable internet access fall further and further behind. They lose out on economic opportunities, on social connections, and, increasingly, on access to critical government services. As researcher Kentaro Toyama puts it:

Technology is a tool; it amplifies existing human capacities. This means that if anything, indiscriminate dissemination of digital technology tends to aggravate inequalities. Technology helps only when there is firm intention economically, politically, culturally to push against the gradient of inequality.

Kentaro Toyama – The Internet and Inequality

This is a powerful insight. If our technology strategies and policies don’t directly work to diffuse and appropriately distribute the benefits of this magnifying potential, then you get what we have today: a massive concentration of economic and technological power. Perhaps the most important conclusion from this is that simple market forces are not going to provide affordable access to internet for everyone. In fact, market forces alone are likely to continue amplifying the digital divide. 

Starlink is a US company owned by Elon Musk that aims to be perhaps the largest internet service provider in the world by building a global constellation of thousands of satellites that promise to bring broadband to all no matter where you live on the planet. This has been tried before. Bill Gates famously lost his shirt betting on a broadband constellation called Teledesic in the 1990s. It is no small technological and financial feat to launch a coordinated constellation of satellites that delivers ubiquitous broadband. But against all odds, Starlink has done it. They now have over 5000 satellites in orbit and claim to have 2 million active subscribers. When Starlink first became available in early 2021, I placed an order and ran it for nearly a year. I had to see for myself if it was the real deal. Despite a few hiccups, it was impressive: download speeds well over 100 Mbps and low-latency connections meant that videoconferencing, movie streaming, and real-time collaboration were all feasible. Even more impressive was the ease of setup. Just plug it in and point it (in an unencumbered space) at the sky.

Around the world, as Starlink became available, there were happy noises of successful connections being made. Affordable access in sparsely populated, low-income regions of the world is something I have worked on for decades. When people asked my opinion of Starlink, how could I not encourage them to embrace the technology if it was available and affordable? And they have. Political leaders have been courted by Starlink and have enthusiastically embraced the technology. The president of Kenya, extolled its transformative power on social media after a visit to Starlink’s facilities in the US. The Nigerian minister of communications proudly declared that Nigeria “now has 100% broadband coverage” after allowing Starlink a license.

On the African continent, the one notable holdout has been the South African government, that is insisting that Starlink should have at least 30% local ownership by blacks, women, and people living with disabilities. This policy applies to any telecommunications company that would like a license to operate in South Africa. The opposition party and tech community in South Africa have thrown up their arms at the government’s decision to stand in the way of progress. Kenya had a similar requirement but was sweet-talked by Starlink into waiving it.

But What’s a LEO Constellation?

Before going further, some context might be helpful. Historically communication satellites have been launched one at a time and positioned so that they remain above a fixed point on the earth operating further out in space. These are called geosynchronous (GEO) satellites. More recently a new category of satellites has emerged, non-geosynchronous (NGSO) satellites that operate in constellations closer to the earth. Because they are closer to earth, they have to fly at a faster pace to maintain their orbit. As a consequence, many satellites (a constellation) are required to provide continuous access over any given spot on the Earth. NGSO satellites are further broken into the general categories of Middle Earth Orbit (MEO) and Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Starlink and Project Kuiper fall into this last category operating at an altitude of 500-1200 km as compared with GEO satellites that operate at 35,000 km. The proximity of LEO satellites to the earth means that they have none of the delays that we associate with traditional satellite communication. Where GEO satellites may have delays in communication of a half a second or more, LEO satellite communication delays can be as little as 30ms.

Is There a Problem?

I believe in the importance of satellite technologies as an essential affordable access mechanism, particularly for remote regions. However, not all satellite technologies are created equal and I think we should choose satellite technologies that empower people in the countries where they operate, that help to build complementary economic and technological ecosystems, and that increase the overall autonomy of people and nations. In this article, I am suggesting that retail LEO satellite constellations do comparatively little of this and are likely to extract more value than they contribute in the longer term.

And here I am making a distinction between wholesale LEO initiatives like OneWeb, Telesat Lightspeed, the EU’s planned IRIS² constellation and others that will offer wholesale access services versus Starlink and Project Kuiper that have been designed for direct-to-consumer retail services. I think wholesale satellite services are more likely to foster local economic ecosystems. They also have the virtue of being orders of magnitude smaller constellations, consisting of hundreds of satellites, which hopefully makes the issue of constellation coexistence less of a challenge.

And let’s not forget the humble GEO stationary satellite. While LEO constellations have been taking the limelight, GEO satellites have been steadily upgraded over the last 5-10 years with new-generation HTS (High Throughput Satellites) versions that are capable of delivering broadband speeds to clients at affordable prices. There is a penalty to pay in latency but for many applications this is not such a big deal. This is happening but it isn’t making the same news as Starlink. In the last month alone, Angola announced that Angosat-2 is connecting 150 locations around the country; Eutelsat Konnect began delivering services in rural Nigeria; and Yahclick commenced broadband services in South Sudan. 

Many concerns have already been raised about Starlink and the sheer volume of satellites that make up the retail LEO constellation. Astronomers are concerned about the extent to which Starlink’s constellation hinders terrestrial astronomical observations, not just visually blocking the night sky but also causing electromagnetic interference with radio astronomy. Others are more concerned by the danger of what would happen if one strayed into the path of another. LEO satellites travel at around 25,000 km/h. For reference, a rifle bullet travels at less than a tenth of that speed. The impact of two satellites colliding could produce the supersonic equivalent of a cluster bomb in space, sending shrapnel in every direction, with each collision creating a new detonation. The impact of this would be to create a debris cloud of potentially millions of pieces of satellite wreckage, effectively rendering near space unusable. This phenomenon is called Kessler Syndrome. While this hasn’t yet happened, there have been near misses and the chance of collision increases as more and more satellites are launched into similar orbits. There are also environmental concerns as to the effect of hundreds, if not thousands, of launches as rocket propellant exhaust interacts with the atmosphere. Any one of these issues might give one enough pause to wonder whether constellations of thousands of satellites are a clever idea. Much has been written about the above. In this article, I want to focus on a few things that I don’t think have received enough attention.

1  Does Starlink’s Business Model Make Sense?

One of the most appealing features of Starlink is its enduser price. With costs varying substantially from country to country, Starlink monthly subscription fees range between US$25 and US$100; hardware costs range between US$200 and US$650 for the Starlink terminal. This puts Starlink in the same ballpark as the price of monthly residential internet service fees in North America, although with higher equipment costs. For the Global Majority, however, these fees still represent costs that are out of reach for all but a narrow segment of the population.

But do Starlink’s prices reflect their actual costs? We don’t know. For a long time it was natural to assume that what a business charges for a service reflects the provider’s costs plus a markup. But in recent years, venture capital has upended that common sense with a push for scale and worry about profits later. We don’t know whether Starlink, like Uber and others before, are deliberately discounting prices to capture the market.

Starlink would not be the first Silicon Valley initiative to tout its financial sustainability, only to fall like a house of cards when the real accounting begins. We need look no further than Alphabet’s Project Loon, an ambitious initiative to create a global fleet of broadband balloons, to see a cautionary tale of tech solutionism. In 2020, Loon and its like were projected to generate $4B in revenue within 10 years. In 2021, Project Loon was abruptly shut down by Alphabet.

I feel pretty confident in saying that Starlink’s current pricing has little to do with their costs but it’s worth trying some back-of-the-napkin maths to probe this further. Here are my assumptions about Starlink, some documented, some guesses:

• A launch to low earth orbit on a Falcon9 rocket costs SpaceX about US$30M. Starlink have said as much and they charge others US$67M for the same, so that seems plausible.
• A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket could lift about 55 of the 1st generation satellites (260kg each) into orbit. However, Starlink has moved on to the heavier (800kg) V2 mini satellites, which means that they can only launch about 22 satellites each time. The V2 mini satellites are said to have about 4 times the capacity of the V1 but as the size of the constellation remains the same, this doesn’t affect the calculations.
• Starlink is planning to have a constellation of 12,000 satellites. The target constellation started out at 4425 satellites and, on October 25th, Starlink applied to launch 30K additional satellites. However, the current constellation plans are for 12,000 satellites so that is the number I’ll go with.
• The average lifespan of a Starlink satellite is about 5 years. Being so close to the earth means that Starlink can offer low-latency connectivity but also means that Starlink satellites are more affected by drag caused by the earth’s atmosphere. Low earth orbit satellites need to be periodically boosted back into their orbits, thus their lifespan is constrained by the amount of fuel they can carry to maintain their orbit.
• Starlink’s failure rate has been estimated at 2.5 to 3%. However, tracking Starlink satellites has suggested that of the 5331 Starlink satellites that have been launched, 363 are not operational, leaving a total of 4968 active satellites. This makes the failure rate closer to 7%. Who knows? In order to keep my calculations as simple as possible, I am going to leave this factor out for now but it is worth keeping in mind.

So what does this tell us? Assuming all satellites will be V2 mini satellites as the 1st generation expires, each satellite costs ~$1.36M ($30M ÷ 22) to launch. I don’t know how much a Starlink satellite costs to manufacture but I am going to choose the lowest estimate I have seen, which is about $250K. Let’s call it ~$1.6M ($1.36M + $250K) per satellite per launch.

That means that it will cost about ~$19B to build a constellation of 12,000 satellites. And here’s the kicker. The moment those satellites go up, they are on a 5 year clock. In order to maintain this constellation Starlink must launch 2,400 satellites per year just to keep 12,000 satellites in orbit. That is nearly $3.9B per year just to maintain the constellation. And this is not taking into account all of the other costs that Starlink incurs, ranging from 150 ground stations (with many more planned), to R&D and manufacturing costs, to national licensing costs, to the small army of lobbyists that span the globe seeking licensing approval for Starlink services.

Starlink has claimed that launch costs will drop dramatically when the much larger Starship rocket comes into operation. However it is worth noting that Starship is an extraordinarily ambitious undertaking that has yet to complete a successful launch. Furthermore, it is the subject of a lawsuit initiated by a coalition of environmental groups as a result of its first launch attempt. All that to say that Starship is currently too large an unknown to be able to factor into Starlink sustainability.

As things currently stand, Starlink made $1.4B in revenue in 2022. They had projected to have 20 million subscribers by 2022 but as of Sept 2023 they had 2 million. They have quite a long way to go before they are anywhere near breaking even. 

Some may argue that a combination of military contracts and government subsidies will keep Starlink alive and this may be true. However, given the capriciousness of Starlink’s owner, Elon Musk, governments may desire military satellite constellations to be under their complete control. And indeed, that is what is happening.

Furthermore, the sweet spot of connectivity for Starlink is surprisingly small. Their target markets are comparatively wealthy rural dwellers who live in remote or sparsely populated areas in which big telcos don’t see a sufficient return for investing in terrestrial infrastructure. Starlink can’t compete in urban areas because there are typically already competitive services available and satellite constellations can’t cope with too many subscribers per satellite, not to mention the need of satellite terminals to have a wide view of the sky. Their key market is always under pressure as telcos do eventually find ways to expand their infrastructure deeper into rural areas.

This year, Starlink made much of receiving permission to operate in several African countries. However, their business case is even weaker in this region. While there is a desperate need for rural connectivity, the number of people living in rural areas with the ability to pay Starlink’s hardware and monthly cost is quite low. For example, as of 2022, an estimated 40 million Nigerians have an income level below the national poverty line of 137,430 naira per person per year, equating to less than US$2 per day.

In theory, Starlink could provide a very useful service to rural Internet Service Providers (ISPs) offering a high speed internet backbone for rural telephony or internet services. But, to do that profitably, Starlink would have to charge a lot more money, which again makes them a less attractive option. And again the number of ISPs that might be Starlink clients is not very large.

In sum, it is impossible for the general public to know what Starlink costs to operate. In November 2023, Elon Musk claimed that Starlink had achieved breakeven cash flow. There is no way to interrogate that claim. Starlink may look profitable, but only as long as Elon Musk is prepared to pour money into it. And, the basic numbers above paint a different picture. I make no claim to authority on this and welcome anyone to improve or correct my somewhat simplistic assumptions.

2  Will Starlink Help to Magnify Global Inequality?

The issue of inequality is what convinced me it was time to write something about retail LEO satellite constellations. As things currently stand, there are only two retail, direct-to-consumer LEO constellations: Starlink and Project Kuiper (a similar project funded by Jeff Bezos). Project Kuiper is at a much earlier stage but it has the same aspirations. It is surely no coincidence that these two projects are funded by the 2nd and 3rd wealthiest people on the planet. These retail constellations represent the end-game of globalisation and capitalism. It is a global internet service provider that invests as little as possible in the countries it operates in. When you connect that Starlink dish, it is not just data beaming up into the sky, it is cold hard cash. SpaceX executives have made it clear that they see Starlink as a cash cow to fund missions to Mars. You can think of every Starlink terminal as beaming dollars up into the sky and down into Elon Musk’s pocket. That is perhaps a slightly hyperbolic description. Starlink customers do have to pay national goods and service taxes on their internet service but the point stands that Starlink invests as little as possible in the countries they operate in.

More and more economists are calling for strategies that create thriving local economies with strong local, circular flows of goods and services. Starlink is almost the antithesis of this. This takes us back to the quotation above from Kentaro Toyama about the way that technology can amplify inequality. Let us imagine a rural town in which existing inequalities dictate that there are only 10-20 people out of a few thousand people with enough resources to pay for a Starlink terminal and its monthly fee. As Starlink becomes available, they eagerly sign up, readily paying any additional shipping fees or surcharges. As happy Starlink customers, they may or may not share access with others in the town but whatever sharing there is will be limited by WiFi access. You may think, well, that’s still a net positive. Starlink has provided access to some. But here’s the rub. Starlink has also effectively silenced those who might be the loudest voices agitating for the government to extend high-speed broadband infrastructure to their entire community As a global retail ISP, Starlink celebrates individualism and libertarianism.

In Rwanda, the government announced that they would offer Starlink connections to 50 schools. Mozambique has gone a step further in announcing Starlink connections for 300 schools. By targeting only schools, they miss the opportunity to address connectivity holistically for communities. It is a curious fact that 97% of the Rwandan population live within 25km of a fibre optic point of presence. By extending fibre optic infrastructure into the communities in which these schools are located, the government could leverage existing infrastructure and build a more sustainable, inclusive, longer term solution.

The impact of Starlink is worse than just celebrating individualism. To understand why, I turn to Tony Atkinson, an economist and pioneer in the study of inequality and poverty. In his book, Inequality  — What can be done?, he makes 15 proposals to address inequality. His very first proposal addresses the issue of technological change. He says:

Proposal 1:  The direction of technological change should be an explicit concern of policy-makers, encouraging innovation in a form that increases the employability of workers and emphasises the human dimension of service provision.

Tony Atkinson – 15 Proposals

Technologies can work to make peoples’ lives better or they can work to undermine people by enabling the concentration of power and wealth. We have choices when it comes to technology and need to think about the “how” as well as the “what” when it comes to internet technologies. Outside an internet connection, Starlink creates no local value. Starlink terminals are designed to be plug-and-play requiring no technical assistance to set up. At first glance, this seems like a wonderful feature. However, consider the employment lost to equipment installers and also the stepping stone that being an installer might be to more challenging jobs. Similarly, the Starlink terminal is a black box. There are absolutely no user serviceable parts, thus no local repair industry. The internet should not be a black box. Internet technologies should be easy to use but should also offer the ability to pry back the lid and understand how they work. They should fit into a complementary ecosystem of access technologies and feed skills development and complementary economics. 

We can contrast this with fibre optic technology which has unlocked several companion industries from civil works companies that dig trenches to technicians who splice fibre in the field, to the actual manufacture of fibre optic cable on the continent. There is a whole ecosystem of complementary businesses that work together to create local employment and wealth. Starlink by contrast is the ultimate extractive technology. It is technological colonialism at its worst.

3  What About National Sovereignty?

Last but not least, we can wonder at the fact that Starlink is allowed to fill the heavens with orbiting satellites that pass over every country on Earth, without those countries having any input into the process. There are now more Starlink satellites in orbit than all other satellites put together. In the absence of any kind of effective regulatory framework, it is a first-come, first-served environment in space. Starlink clearly hopes to create a de facto regulatory framework just by being there, in the spirit that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

In the world of radio spectrum management, every country is sovereign when it comes to the airwaves in the skies above their countries. As members of the International Telecommunications Union, a treaty organisation that brokers agreements among countries on radio spectrum use, countries typically don’t act unilaterally when it comes to radio spectrum but they can. The airwaves belong to them. 

National sovereignty and space is not a new issue. In 1976, a number of equatorial states attempted to assert sovereignty over the geostationary orbits of satellites over their countries. The Bogotá Declaration, as it is known, asserted the right of “peoples and of nations to permanent sovereignty over their wealth and natural resources” and that they considered “geostationary orbit to be an integral part of their sovereign territory”. The Bogota Declaration was a response to the Outer Space Treaty developed nearly a decade earlier which declared that space should be freely explored and used by all nations. Ultimately the declaration was not successful but it brought to light the complex issue of equitable access to and use of space. Currently only 10 countries and one intergovernmental organisation have the capacity to launch rockets into space. This is a significant qualifier to the notion that space should be free to all. As a scarce resource, the limited number of orbital slots has been dominated by those with first-mover advantage.

Fast forward to today and a similar situation is emerging for LEO satellites. While there are no allocated slots for LEO constellations, “heavy use of certain orbital regions might also result in a de facto exclusion of other actors from them, violating the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.” 

Summary

Massive retail LEO constellations may simply not be viable. They need thousands and thousands of satellites in their constellations to be able to deliver broadband to individual customers and to keep the cost of their satellite terminals low. The cost of maintaining such large constellations requires vast amounts of capital and it is not clear that the retail markets for this service are large enough to sustain one, let alone two massive global retail LEO constellations.

Even if they are sustainable, they are simply not desirable. They will selectively provide service in remote areas, taking the pressure off governments to provide truly pervasive broadband solutions in remote areas.

These megaconstellations are likely to create de facto exclusion for all but the wealthiest countries to participate in broadband satellite constellations.

They are economically lopsided, extracting value without contributing to local economies. Starlink will not even invest in ground stations in countries where they don’t see enough revenue, which undermines the much vaunted low-latency advantage.

We need to talk about space and its regulation. The 1960s saw a time of internationalisation in space, a view of it as a shared resource for all. We can still get back there but not if Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos establish de facto rules simply by occupying that territory. 

Une version française de cet article est disponible ici grâce aux efforts de Vincent Roger-Machart.
Uma versão em português deste artigo está disponível aqui graças ao Nupef.

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I am grateful to Carlos Rey-Moreno, Peter Bloom, Adriana Labardini, and Katherine Barrett for invaluable feedback on the original draft. All errors and underlying assumptions remain my own. This article presents my personal perspective and does not represent the views of Mozilla or APC.

This used to be true. Twenty years ago a network operator in Africa had to solve every aspect of the telecommunications value chain — from international access via undersea cable (realistically satellite then), to national backhaul communication routes, local access networks, handsets, agent networks, the list goes on. All of that has changed. By 2023, Sub-Saharan African countries alone will be served by more than 20 undersea fibre optic cables. This is now complemented by more than a million kilometres of terrestrial fibre deployed across the continent.

Understanding fibre optic technology is fundamental to understanding the challenge of affordable access. Fibre optic infrastructure is qualitatively different from other access technologies in two important respects. The first is its sheer capacity. Fibre optic networks can carry orders of magnitude greater capacity than any other access technology. The image below (courtesy of Meta) does a great job of illustrating the difference. The practical impact is that fibre is what the economists call a non-rival good; that is to say, that consumption by one operator does not inhibit consumption by another operator.

The second important characteristic of fibre is its longevity. A well-installed terrestrial fibre optic network can last 20 to 25 years. Contrast this with wireless technologies whose lifespan is often less than 5 years. Many fibre optic networks can often be affordably upgraded by replacing the terminating equipment with upgraded signal processing technology. The impact is that, when treated as a long term investment, fibre can often deliver the cheapest, fastest, most durable broadband in the world.

But let’s come back to the issue of fibre as a non-rival good. This feature of fibre networks has the potential to transform competition in telecommunications markets. Standardised, low-cost wholesale fibre access could unlock potential for small-scale operators to deliver competitive local services, whether through a commercial ISP, a cooperative, a community network or a municipal government. There is no longer any reason for telecommunication operators to be national in scope.

A New Metaphor

The impact of this disaggregation of telecommunication infrastructure is profound. I believe it is what will ultimately enable affordable access to internet for all. Now why would that be?

I like to explain this through the metaphor of trying to fill a glass jar with stones. This is a concept that developed in discussion with my colleagues Peter Bloom and Erick Huerta a few years ago. Erick had been influenced by the work of Fernand Braudel, a French economic historian. Braudel argued that we don’t live in a single economy but rather two, a global economy and a local economy. The global economy is capitalism in its raw form as embodied by massive transnational corporations and in which the endgame for participants is complete control of the market or monopoly. We see the global economy every day through omnipresent brands from Amazon to Shell to MTN. At the same time, though, we also all live and participate in local economies served by a wide variety of local enterprises that comprise a vast array of local businesses from grocers to butchers to tradespeople. The list is endless. The endgame for these local entrepreneurs is not monopoly but simply thriving local business.

And indeed, the local economy goes beyond commercial enterprise to include other business models from cooperatives to non-profits to informal arrangements among local groups. While no small business on its own makes a noticeable contribution to GDP, taken in aggregate, some countries report that SMMEs are responsible for as much as 50% of GDP.

Now back to our jar of stones. We can look at the telecom sector in a new way through the use of a simple metaphor. If you try to fill a glass Mason jar with roughly fist-sized stones, you can fit a few of them in there but not very many. The jar looks full of stones but if you fill that jar with water, the water still takes up more than 50% of the volume. It’s true, I’ve tried. I think this is a great way of understanding the telecommunications industry as we see it in 2023.

Twenty-five years of privatisation and liberalisation in the telecom sector have revealed the reality that most countries cannot sustain more than 3 or 4 national operators. Some countries struggle to maintain that many. Yet the problem of connecting the almost half of the world that remains without affordable access to the internet persists. On the face of it, it does seem unlikely that the business model of a one-size-fits-all national operator may not be optimal for service delivery in challenging markets and regions. Not to mention the fact that the nimble nature of small businesses means that they are often better placed to innovate new services and delivery mechanisms to meet challenging environments.

Now that fibre optic backbone networks have unlocked the potential for multiple local operators, it is time lower the all the barriers to small-scale operators entering the market. You can think of this as filling the jar with smaller stones that are uniquely shaped to fit the different empty spaces in the jar. Note that making space for these new stones doesn’t reduce the size of the large stones. Rather they grow the volume of stones or the market. Thanks to network effects, the growth of the market will benefit large operators as well.

While I have focused on the market-enabling nature of fibre optic networks above, they alone are not enough to unlock the potential of small-scale operators. For that to happen, small-scale operators need to be embraced by governments, by regulators, and by investors as having the potential to collectively play as strategic a role in delivering affordable access as national operators do.

There are a number of things that have to change in order for this to happen.

Regulation

Independent regulation of the telecommunication sector emerged in response to the privatisation of formerly state-owned telecommunication operators and the liberalisation of the market which allowed new national market entrants. Understandably, these large scale operators have commanded the attention of regulators, leading to rules and regulations geared towards the compliance of large corporations. Small-scale operators have often struggled to operate within this environment, faced with fees and administrative burdens that were disproportionate to their size and to the often-fledgling nature of their enterprises. When we plant seedlings in a garden, we clear space for them and protect them until they have had a chance to put down roots. We need to adopt a similar philosophy with small-scale operators when it comes to regulatory oversight. This is not heresy. It is exactly what government SMME programs have been doing for years, just not in the telecom sector.

Investment

Access to investment funding for small-scale operators is also a huge challenge. Their potential is often not well-understood by investors. They also may not be offered the right kind of funding. Venture Capital (VC) funding for small-scale operators, for example, may be exactly the opposite of what they need. Because they are in the local economy not the global economy, VC expectations of scale create perverse incentives for growth at the expense of adapting business models more specifically to local conditions. Happily, investors like Connectivity Capital are challenging that status quo by offering investment that encourages stable growth.

And it is not just commercial small-business that needs investment. Community-owned network infrastructure ranging from blazing fast fibre optic infrastructure in northern England to rural wireless cooperatives in the Eastern Cape of South Africa can provide alternative business models for internet access that are well-suited to the communities / markets they serve. Unfortunately it is often the case that where funding for small-scale operators is available, community-owned networks, which can range from non-profits to cooperatives to municipal networks, are excluded because they don’t fit the traditional commercial operator model.

Access to Spectrum

With local business models for access must come localised access to radio spectrum. Small-scale operators often depend on unlicensed WiFi spectrum to be able to deliver services but limitations in power output and limited amounts of license-exempt spectrum mean that they are not the ideal fit for some access challenges. We need to unlock more spectrum for local access using both license-exempt and licensed frameworks for access.

Backhaul Affordability

Last but by no means least, we must come back to fibre optic networks. It is not enough to build a million plus kilometres of fibre across the continent, it must be put to use. Terrestrial fibre optic networks are typically significantly underutilised due to lack of affordability, especially in rural areas. It is ironic that the remote areas that most need affordable access are the most expensive regions in which to access fibre backhaul. Typically, the further away you are from a landing station or a capital city, the more expensive your fibre access. It doesn’t have to be this way. If we are to unlock the potential of small-scale operators and, in doing so, unlock affordable access for all (filling that jar of stones), we need to both lower and flatten the cost of wholesale access to fibre optic networks.

Filling the Jar

So the next time someone talks to you about improving market competition in the telecom sector, tell them about the game of stones. I am willing to bet you will have a more interesting conversation than you might otherwise have had. Ask how small-scale operators might be empowered to deliver services. Not only can they deliver innovative business models to provide access in underserved regions but they can also nip at the heels of the incumbents, spurring them on to better and cheaper services.

Undersea Cables

There is a point when amazing things that happen repeatedly become simply banal. You would be forgiven for not being dazzled by new undersea cable announcements for African countries, given the number of cables that now encircle the continent.

However, there is a sea change underway in the world of African undersea cables. In December, the PEACE cable went live in Kenya and Egypt. The PEACE cable has a design capacity of 96 Tbps. That is by far the largest capacity cable to land on the continent. And that distinction will only last a few months as the EQUIANO cable is scheduled to go live in 2023, followed by the 2Africa cable in 2024. These two cables represent a collective design capacity of more than 320 Tbps. Together, these three undersea cables represent more capacity than all the existing undersea cables serving the continent put together. News about these cables in 2022 mostly related to announcements of landing points being established in key locations on the continent. The good news is that this massive increase in capacity is likely to drive down the price of international capacity. The bad news is that it is only like to happen in markets where those cables land. Poor countries that don’t represent a big enough market for these big cables may be further marginalised by ongoing high international capacity costs. It is also unclear how a shift from operator-led undersea cable consortia to cables largely financed by Silicon Valley giants will affect markets.

African Undersea Cable News in 2022

Terrestrial Backbone Fibre

2022 saw continued significant investment in the spread of terrestrial fibre networks. Namibia’s Paratus emerged as a substantial regional player in in Southern Africa, with news of expansions in Botswana, DRC, and Zambia. Cross-border connectivity gaps continued to be filled, linking countries such as Cameroon with Chad and Sudan, Congo with CAR, Cameroon with CAR, and South Sudan with Djibouti (MoU). In spite of these investments, terrestrial fibre optic networks remain underutilised. Prices remain high and there is often a lack of transparency on pricing and availability of fibre optic networks. Indeed simply knowing where fibre optic infrastructure exists can be a challenge.

Happily, a consortium of organisations including Mozilla, ITU, the World Bank, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, CSquared, the Internet Society, and Digital Council Africa joined forces to address this lack of transparency by championing an Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS) for accurately (and openly) describing terrestrial fibre network infrastructure. The standard (now in Beta) can be found on Github. There is also extensive documentation of the standard on the site as well. Much of my work in 2023 is going to be focused on engaging operators and telecommunication regulators in dialogue about this standard and transparency in general.

African Terrestrial Fibre Optic News in 2022

Fibre To The Home and OTT

One of the more surprising shifts in last mile technologies on the continent has been the speed at which Fibre To The Home (FTTH) has spread. The availability of high-capacity fibre optic backbones, increased affordability of last-mile fibre optic technologies, demand for remote video conferencing as a result of the pandemic, and the availability of a wide array of streaming media OTT services have all contributed to the acceleration of FTTH roll-out. Obviously this is only practical in urban areas but lessons from South Africa suggest that even quite small towns can make the case for FTTH.

FTTH and OTT are here together as a category because of the role that OTT companies and services play as a driver of the FTTH market. While it is encouraging to see the uptake of streaming media services, it is amazing to see the growth of African content thanks to investment from OTT giants like Netflix. Not to be left out, many telecom operators have launched their own streaming services but if recent history in South Africa is anything to go by, it may be better left to specialist service providers.

The success of OTT has implications for the broadcast sector in general. For countries engaged in the switchover from analogue to digital terrestrial broadcasting, one can only wonder whether the millions of dollars involved in the transition will ever be recouped if OTT continues to grow and dominate consumer media consumption. Countries like South Africa which are now very late to complete the digital switchover are in the invidious position of having to commit to a technology which may already have passed its prime.

African FTTH and OTT News in 2022

Licensed Spectrum

The challenge of making wireless spectrum available to mobile network operators in a manner that is fair to operators and yet which also addresses national strategic objectives did not get any easier in 2022. Notable releases of IMT spectrum included the long-awaited spectrum auction in South Africa, the auction of additional 5G spectrum licenses in Nigeria, and Tanzania’s auction of multiple frequencies.

What is wireless spectrum worth? Taking a look below at the sampling of prices paid for spectrum in 2022, it hard to see any sort of pattern. Naturally prices are affect by the amount of spectrum on offer and the specific frequency which may have characteristics better suited to urban broadband e.g. 3.5GHz or rural roll-out e.g. 700MHz. Spectrum prices are also affected by overall income levels in a country as well as the size of the addressable market. But it doesn’t stop there. The term of the license (10, 15, 25 years) will have a big impact on the prices as well as any roll-out obligations that are associated with the licenses. Last but not least, government desire for a treasury windfall can also have a significant effect on the reserve price of spectrum. All of these things shape the final outcome.

One thing is clear, given the millions and millions of dollars at stake, there is a real need for more transparency regarding the assignment of IMT spectrum by regulators and for more public-interest research on the impact of spectrum costs.

In other news in 2022, 5G deployments picked up pace in 2022 with notable roll-outs in Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Many other countries have trials underway. Without exception, these have been urban deployments and quite naturally aimed at the top end of the market where both demand for high-speed access and ability to pay is higher. It has caused some to question the utility of these deployments. Perhaps more attention needs to be given to inclusion and making broadband available and accessible by all citizens rather new technologies that cater to an elite that already have broadband access.

Unlicensed and Dynamic Spectrum

One of the interesting consequences of the pandemic has been the increase in demand for home internet services by those who needed to either work remotely and/or provide access to education services for their children. FTTH services (as mentioned above) have grown rapidly as a result but so have Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) services. WiFi has proven to be a very successful technology for FWA although many MNOs are also offering FWA in licensed bands. Indeed, most 5G offerings to date on the continent have been more FWA than individual mobile phone services. A key difference between mobile and FWA services seems to be that FWA is often offered as an uncapped service which is more suitable for household/business access where monitoring individual access may be impractical and/or undesirable.

African governments continue to see WiFi as a means of providing affordable public access to internet. The governments of Uganda, Mozambique and Kenya all made commitments in 2022 to roll out public WiFi services. Meanwhile, commercial WiFi service providers like Mawingu in Kenya and Tizeti in Nigeria quietly attracted more investment and expanded services in 2022.

The success of WiFi around the world has led to a push for more spectrum (in 6GHz) to be made available on a license-exempt basis. In the African region, South Africa led the way in December publishing draft regulations that would open up the lower half of the 6GHz band for license exempt use.

In the world of TV White Space spectrum, things were pretty quiet in the past year. South Africa was the only country that saw additional deployments of TVWS networks in 2022. I wrote about the challenges facing TVWS adoption in the region earlier in the year.

In somewhat disappointing news, Meta (Facebook) shut down their ExpressWiFi initiative which was working with ISPs around the world to create an affordable, high-performance WiFi platform for service providers. This follows on the heels of Alphabet (Google) shutting down a similar initative called Google Station in 2020. It is hard not to be somewhat cynical about the dilettantism of Silicon Valley giants who set out with grand ambitions to connect the world but quickly flush them as soon as profits dip. The image on the right is from what used to be the home page of internet.org. Somewhat ironically, that link now points to Meta’s ambitions for the Metaverse.

African WiFi & Dynamic Spectrum News 2022

Towers

Tower news this year is very similar to last year and the year before. MNOs continue to sell off their tower assets to tower companies. In theory, this is good news as tower companies represent neutral infrastructure to host more than one operator on their towers. Sometimes tower outsourcing can turn out to be too much of a good thing in cases where there is consolidation of tower operators, leading to claims of monopoly. Unfortunately it is very difficult to say anything concrete about the impact of tower companies on the continent as there is so little public information. It would be wonderful to better understand the extent to which MNO outsourcing to tower companies has an impact on overall infrastructure sharing. This lack of transparency is not a given. Regulators in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France all publish detailed public information on towers across their countries.

African Tower News in 2022

Datacentres

Undersea cables and terrestrial fibre can offer faster access to the global internet but the widespread establishment of datacentres in African countries is key to growing an Afro-centric internet. The good news is that fibre operators, cloud providers, and governments are all moving to invest in datacentres across the continent. Like terrestrial fibre, the accessibility and affordability of these datacentres will have a significant impact on their uptake and ultimately their impact. Cloud-based access technologies like OpenRAN will succeed or fail in the region based on the availability and affordability of cloud infrastructure.

African Datacentre News in 2022

Satellite

The Starlink LEO satellite constellation began offering broadband services in 2021 and now claims over a million customers globally. I think many were optimistic that Starlink might be available in some African countries in 2022 but that doesn’t seem to have come to pass. Several countries, including Nigeria, Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia have confirmed regulatory approval of Starlink. Starlink appears to be accepting pre-orders even in countries where approval has not yet been granted. One news report claimed Starlink would be operational in Nigeria before the end of 2022 but there doesn’t appear to be any actual evidence of this.

The big question is what will Starlink charge for services and hardware in Africa, and what its terms of service will be. One report suggests that the cost of the satellite terminal in Nigeria will be only $99 and the monthly fee would be about $43, in contrast to the $599 terminal cost and $99 monthly fee charged in the United States.

As a single user/household consumer technology, Starlink will only be of interest to the comparatively wealthy. However, as a small-ISP backhaul technology, Starlink could have a significant impact on affordable rural access. Time will tell whether they will allow / encourage this use of the technology.

Meanwhile, competitor OneWeb has been busy making deals on the continent as well. They have built a gateway in Ghana and partnered with Paratus to build one in Angola as well. They have also partnered with Airtel on a plan to offer services in 14 African countries. As yet, OneWeb is not yet operational. Estimates suggest that commercial service will only become available towards the end of 2023.

Not to be left out, Lightspeed (another LEO constellation in the works from Canadian satellite operator Telesat) have announced a cooperation with Liquid Intelligent Technologies. Because they are more focused on corporate customers, OneWeb and Telesat might be a better fit for rural Africa as a backhaul option for ISPs and MNOs. However, it seems as if Starlink will be offering services long before either of them and may adapt to fit that market.

GEO satellite service providers have not been idle either. Eutelsat have partnered with Liquid Intelligent Technologies to offer broadband services in Uganda, South Sudan, and DRC. Viasat have partnered with Microsoft to offer satellite broadband services in Nigeria and DRC and possibly Senegal and Angola as well. Meanwhile, Intelsat have partnered with MTN to extend services in South Sudan. All of these initiatives involve new generation High Throughput Satellites (HTS) that are capable of delivering real broadband services albeit with higher latency than LEO satellite services.

African Satellite Broadband News in 2022

Miscellaneous

Last but not least is a grab bag of news that did not fit into an obvious category. Most of it is telecoms-focused but I have cast the net a bit wider where it seemed interesting.

Notable in 2022 was the rise of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) operators. These are operators / manufacturers that specialise in the design and operation of low-cost, energy-efficient, rural GSM networks. Africa Mobile Networks (AMN), NuRAN Wireless, and Vanu are the major players in this space. They partner with existing MNOs to offer turnkey rural access networks in exchange for a share of revenue. 2022 saw Orange partnering with Vanu in Cote D’Ivoire and NuRAN partnering with MTN in Namibia. Later in the year NuRAN signed a broader framework agreement with MTN to offer services across the Middle East and Africa. Meanwhile AMN secured a $20M round of investment. Huawei is also a player in this space with a product called RuralStarPro. They have partnered with the Ghanaian government to roll out over 2000 rural cell sites.

Meta came under fire in Africa in 2022 and not just for shutting down ExpressWiFi. Facebook’s outsourcing of content moderation came under scrutiny as did their failure to adequately address misinformation. And long overdue from my perspective, researchers and journalists began to look at Meta’s “free” internet initiatives from Free Basics to zero-rating of apps like WhatsApp.

As a counterpoint, it was encouraging to see startups like South Africa’s MoyaApp emerging as a home-grown alternative to global messaging giants. From a policy/regulatory perspective, why would you allow the zero-rating of apps and services from global internet giants, thereby ensuring that domestic messaging startups will always face an uphill battle?

Miscellaneous African Telecom News in 2022

And that’s it! Naturally a review like this is subject to my own biases. What do you think deserved more emphasis in 2022? What did I miss? For interest, of the more than 140 news sources consulted for this review, here are the top ten news sources. Obviously there is a heavy English-language bias. Who should I be paying more attention to?

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This work would not have been possible without the support of the Mozilla Corporation and the Association for Progressive Communications

Postscript:

This is where I find myself with TVWS or Television White Space technology. I have been an advocate of TVWS since 2008. Fourteen years later, TVWS has seen some successes but has yet to achieve widespread adoption.

For the uninitiated, TVWS is an innovation both in wireless regulation and technology. It is a wireless broadband technology for Point-to-Point and Point-to-MultiPoint links that operates in the wireless spectrum traditionally used by television broadcasters. Historically, television broadcast technology has always relied on leaving empty channels between broadcast channels. TVWS was designed to fit inside those empty channels without interfering with the television broadcast. While the way television frequencies are organised is changing with the transition to digital broadcasting, the fact remains that, in most countries, a significant part of the frequencies allocated for television broadcast remain unused, especially in rural areas.  

What’s exciting about TVWS?

Two things make TVWS a unique and interesting technology. The first has to do with the radio spectrum that TVWS uses. The propagation of radio frequencies changes as you move up and down the frequency bands. Lower radio frequencies, such as those used in television broadcast, have the virtue of being able to penetrate foliage and even navigate larger obstacles like hills, buildings, etc. Compare this with WiFi technology, operating at 2.4 or 5.8GHz, that requires a clear line of sight between radios in order to operate. In certain cases, TVWS, which uses broadcast spectrum in the range of 470-698MHz, could lower network deployment costs by only requiring a single point to point connection where a WiFi or other wireless backhaul technology would either have to introduce one or more intermediate links to get over a hill, for example, or build a much taller tower in order to be able to “see” the other radio antenna. This is known as a Non Line-of-Sight technology (NLOS). While TVWS is not infallible, it represents a very useful tool for an internet service provider to have in their connectivity toolbox.

The second, and arguably more important, issue that makes TVWS unique and interesting is that it represents a new approach to the management of radio spectrum. Wireless technologies often take a long time to come to fruition because the use of specific wireless frequencies for a particular technology is governed by national regulatory bodies who in turn are guided by a UN treaty organisation called the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) which brokers consensus on how specific radio frequencies should be used. Brokering international consensus is a slow moving process in any field and this is no less true in telecommunications. It can sometimes take a decade or more for a wireless technology to be widely recognised by national regulators. The upshot of this is that technologies often atrophy many years before consensus can be reached on the re-allocation of wireless frequencies they need in order to operate.

TVWS represents a complementary spectrum management strategy that allows for the re-use of frequencies assigned to television broadcast on the condition they do not interfere with any existing or planned broadcast signals. Kind of like letting someone stay in your house while you’re not there.

I think of TVWS as a kind of “while you’re waiting” technology by which I mean to say that it doesn’t necessarily depend on slow international cycles of frequency reallocation. It allows for a radio frequency to be used as long as nobody else is using it. TVWS was first proposed back in 2003 in the United States. The unused channels in television broadcast frequencies seemed like a perfect fit for this serendipitous re-use of spectrum.

It is important also to note that while the principle of secondary re-use of spectrum was pioneered with TVWS, the principle can be applied to any spectrum.  Indeed, both the US and UK regulators have been applying this principle to LTE/5G spectrum in different ways.

The Initial Spread of TVWS

In the United States, where TVWS was pioneered, advocates of the technology encountered a lot of political opposition. Broadcasters expressed concern about potential interference with television broadcast and wireless microphone manufacturers (who were already squatting in unused television spectrum) were also concerned about potential interference. The push-back from these organisations was such that, while TVWS regulation was enacted, the constraints placed upon its operation were extremely strict, limiting its effectiveness and ease-of-deployment. Not only was TVWS very limited in terms of power output and how close it could operate to television channels in use by broadcasters, but it was also determined that TVWS could not be trusted to detect and avoid television broadcast frequencies on their own. It was determined that all TVWS devices must therefore regularly authenticate with a geo-location database which would determine which frequencies, if any, were available for use. The creation and operation of these databases was outsourced to the market and it was assumed that database service providers would make sufficient revenue from operators paying a modest sum per device to access the database. That was at a time when it was assumed that IoT was a part of the TVWS landscape and there might be millions of devices connecting to these databases, creating a competitive market for database service providers.

This is the regulatory model that was ultimately exported to the rest of the world. As a pioneer in spectrum regulation and a massive market unto itself, regulatory innovations, other countries often follow where the US leads in spectrum innovation. The UK, Singapore and a few other countries adopted TVWS and implemented geo-location databases with slight variations in frequencies and power levels in each country. On the African continent, trials in TVWS began in late 2012 in Kenya and South Africa, supported by Microsoft and Google respectively. Trials spread to Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Ghana and other countries in the region but actual regulation was slow in coming. In 2013, Google and Microsoft (and others) founded an industry association called the Dynamic Spectrum Alliance to promote TVWS regulation. They developed model regulations to assist regulators in adopting TVWS.

What Happened After

In the United States, everything initially seemed to go as planned. Regulations were introduced and geo-location database providers were certified. Microsoft got behind TVWS deployments in the US with their AirBand initiative. However, the restrictive TVWS rules limited adoption and that limited demand meant that costs remained relatively high as manufacturers were unable to achieve economies of scale in production.

Meanwhile, WiFi was going through a small revolution. The discovery that low-power WiFi could be focused into a high-speed, point-to-point broadband technology unlocked a whole new industry of manufacturers producing inexpensive WiFi equipment for backhaul. Names like Mikrotik, Ubiquiti, Cambium, Mimosa and others were transforming wireless backhaul from a technology costing tens of thousands of dollars to one costing hundreds. Now, in order to survive, TVWS had to be cheaper and more effective than the WiFi industry, a task that has become increasingly difficult as WiFi equipment grows in sophistication even as it drops in cost.

In African countries, TVWS regulation has been passed in South Africa (2018), Mozambique (2019) and Kenya (2021). It has gotten as far as a consultative stage in countries like Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, and Uganda but failed to get any further. My belief is that the challenge of how to implement a geo-location database has been the chief stumbling block for these latter countries. 

The “market forces” approach of the United States, which assumed that a thriving TVWS industry would pay for the operation of a commercial geo-location database service provider, has not really found itself not fit for purpose in African countries.  For communication regulators in emerging markets, the problem with geo-location databases is manifold. Who will pay for the database? Who will operate the database? Who will validate and oversee the database? Can we really trust a database? The list goes on. 

Companies trying to make a business out of TVWS geo-location services have struggled.  Most of the first companies to offer these services have moved on. Nominet, the .UK domain name registrar decided to get into the geo-location business but failed to make a go of it. They sold the technology to a French company called Red Technologies. Finnish company Fair Spectrum have stuck it out the longest and still offer TVWS geo-location database services.

South Africa is the exception to this thanks to the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) who invested significantly in developing their own TVWS geo-location database. Like others, CSIR hoped to commercialise their database technology but that has yet to transpire. The good news is that the South African regulator is the beneficiary of their hard work, being able to rely on CSIR for geo-location database services. It is not clear whether money is changing hands for that service, but I doubt it. As both entities are funded by the South African government, it might be a bit like taking money out of a left pocket to put in a right pocket.

TVWS in 2022

The people I really feel for in the TVWS world are the manufacturers of the access points and consumer terminals. Companies like Adaptrum, 6harmonics, Carlson Wireless and many others have gamely developed this innovative technology, trusting regulators to create the environment necessary for them to thrive. Many of them remain in business but struggle to reduce costs and invest in innovation due to limited demand.

In the United States, TVWS appears to be moribund. A report from the National Association of Broadcasters suggested, in 2021, that only 300 devices were connected to geo-location databases in the United States. To be fair, this is a claim from the broadcasters’ association so you have to take it with a grain of salt. But crucially, I haven’t seen this figure rebutted by anyone. In the UK, TVWS geo-location database service providers have apparently shrunk to just one, Red Technologies. There is no indication of how many devices are registered.

Here’s the current status of TVWS regulation in Sub-Saharan Africa:

Looking through the list of countries and results, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the implementation of a geo-location database for TVWS is a significant stumbling block to the successful implementation of the technology. African regulators have struggled to contend with the imperfect TVWS regulatory model that emerged out of conditions unique to the United States, which raise the question as to whether there isn’t an opportunity for regulators in the region to define their own path to TVWS.

Don’t get me wrong, I think databases are the future of spectrum regulation. Well-designed databases are ideal for efficient management of scarce resources. However, there is an opportunity to act in parallel, to issue authorisations for TVWS spectrum in rural areas where television spectrum is dramatically underutilised, while simultaneously taking the necessary time and care to develop a sustainable geo-location database strategy.

How to Save TVWS

In spite of the perhaps bleak picture that I have painted of TVWS, I continue to think it is an important technology for affordable access to communication and that it is possible to design regulation that is fit for purpose. Here’s what I would do:

• Regulation Now, Database Later
  Introduce TVWS regulation without the requirement of geo-location database operation initially. In most African countries, there is sufficient unused UHF spectrum, especially in rural areas, that manual assignments are possible. Whether that is managed internally via a spreadsheet or even a database, the point is to keep it in-house and simple while the market evolves. The exception to this rule is perhaps South Africa who already have a working database.
  
• Implement a temporary fee moratorium for ISPs
  TVWS’s competition is cheap WiFi broadband. Until the market is established, ISPs should be exempted from any fees associated with TVWS in order to lower the barrier to adoption. The goal of the regulator should be to create a vibrant market for TVWS. Once the market is established, it is reasonable to review the fee structure.
  
• Simplify homologation and consider temporary import duty exemptions
  Make TVWS manufacturers your friends. They have been running an ultra marathon waiting for regulation. Give them a sign of hope.
  
• Pursue Open Source for a shared geo-location database platform
  If TVWS is to succeed, every regulator in the world faces the same challenge of affordably and securely implementing a geo-location database. This is the ideal scenario for an open source solution where development costs may be shared. It is also likely to improve security as many countries will be testing the limits of the same technology. Perhaps a philanthropy or development agency could be tempted to buy the geo-location software from the CSIR or Red or Fair Spectrum and release the code under an open license.
  
• Consider a regional approach
  I have previously proposed a regional approach to geo-location database implementation. Regional regulatory bodies like CRASA, EACO, and WATRA are potentially well-positioned to support this. A regional approach would:
  • significantly lower costs by sharing them across member countries;
  • promote harmonisation of standards in TVWS regulation;
  • allow the least resourced regulators to enjoy the same benefits as the best resourced; and,
  • address any potential cross-border interference issues.

These actions may seem drastic to some and indeed one person has accused me of being a foreign agent for proposing dropping the initial requirement of a geo-location database but nothing could be further from the truth. I am proposing that African countries (and beyond) cease to feel constrained by hamstrung regulation that emerged out of a unique situation in the United States.  I would like to add that while I have written about the regulation of TVWS in African countries (because that is the region I am familiar with) I think the same issues are likely to apply in much of Latin America and Asia.

I am indebted to my colleagues Adriana Labardini, Peter Bloom, Carlos Rey-Moreno, and Erick Huerta for feedback that improved this post.  All errors remain mine.  This work would not have been possible without the support of Mozilla and the Association for Progressive Communications. Views are my own.

Undersea Cables

The continued increase in capacity and number of undersea cables reaching the shores of African countries is truly a wonder to watch. The METISS cable linking Madagascar, Reunion, and Mauritius with South Africa went live March. DARE-1, an undersea cable connecting Kenya with Somalia and Djibouti went live in February. EllaLink, which stretches from Latin America to Europe went into operation in June, connecting Cabo Verde, Mauritania, and Morocco along the way. Last but not least, the ACE cable finally connected its second phase reaching all the way down to South Africa. That’s a lot of new capacity. But wait, there’s more.

All of those new cables together will not match the capacity of either of the two massive silicon-valley funded cables, Equiano and 2Africa led by Google and Facebook respectively. For Equiano, which promises to go live in 2022, things have been pretty quiet, which is perhaps not surprising given how little news has been released by Google about the cable since its original announcement. Google did announce a partnership with Paratus to land the cable in Namibia but not much else made the news. 2Africa also announced new partnerships to land the 2africa cable in Angola, Comoros, south eastern Nigeria, and the Seychelles. 2Africa is projected to go live in 2023.

Although not in the same capacity class as Equiano and 2Africa, the China-financed PEACE cable is set to go live in early 2022, connecting Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, and the Seychelles to Pakistan.

Changing hands in 2021 was MainOne, which was sold to Equinix for $320M. Pioneered by Nigerian entrepreneur Funke Opeke, MainOne was first of a new generation of high-capacity undersea cables to reach West Africa in 2010. MainOne stood out as being one of the few independent undersea cable initiatives.

Terrestrial Backbone Fibre

As a natural extension of undersea connectivity, investment in terrestrial fibre networks also grew in 2021. As with 2020, there were more cross-border fibre announcements including Cameroon-Chad, Cameroon-Gabon, Tanzania-Mozambique and others. This is good news for redundancy of network routes but also hopefully for lower costs, especially for land-locked countries, as more international access options appear.

2021 also saw the continued rise of regional fibre powerhouses such as Liquid Intelligent Technologies (formerly Liquid Telecom) who now have terrestrial fibre reaching from South Africa to Egypt and from Kenya to DRC. West Africa may be next as Liquid have announced a partnership with Orange. They are not the only regional players though. Paratus has expanded from Namibia into the Southern African region. BCS in have fibre infrastructure throughout East Africa. Regional operators like MTN and Orange are not far behind in establishing regional backbones.

Also notable this year was the continuing trend of power companies investing in fibre, often partnering with telcos to offer services.