Earlier this week I came across this wonderful master’s thesis entitled Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti by Noah Iliinsky. We have all at various times had our minds numbed by needlessly complex diagrams that did more to obscure the issue than explain it. This is the first insightful analysis I have seen about what makes a good or bad diagram. Well written and with many excellent examples of great and awful diagrams.
I posted this link to the KM4Dev community and was richly rewarded. Naturally, the now famous Hans Rosling and his TED talk on Gapminder was mentioned. Next, an excellent Economist article, Worth a Thousand Words, profiling historical instances where graphics have informed policy change was suggested. Finally, someone pointed out the recently-released Visualizing Information: An Introduction to Information Design for Advocacy , funded by OSI. Excellent resources for upping your communication game.
Seacom has emerged as a clear front runner in the African undersea cable stakes. They are the first initiative to declare a completion date, 17 June 2009 (after which cable company Tyco will incur performance penalties). More impressively they have revealed their wholesale pricing scheme which looks like this:
According to mybroadband.co.za:
The company will have a four tiered bandwidth pricing approach where bandwidth prices for larger products, in this case STM-64, STM-16 and STM-4 connections, are sold at reduced rates to the standard STM-1 connection.
Their price for an STM-1 connection however sets a roof for the resale of bandwidth by larger bulk-bandwidth buyers thereby ensuring that smaller players receive a competitive rate.
The price for an STM-64 connection, supplying 9.6 Gbps of bandwidth, is $ 1 663 875 or R 267-00 per Mbps per month. The price per Mbps per month for a STM-1 (155 Mbps) service is R 673-00 while a STM-4 (600 Mbps) connection costs R 575-00 and a STM-16 (2.5 Gbps) service will cost R 435-00.
For the uninitiated, an STM-1 (also known as OC-3) equates to a capacity of 155.52 Mbps. STM-4 (or OC-12) is 622.08 Mbps, STM-16 (or OC-48) is 2.488 Gbps, and finally STM-64 (or OC-192) is 10 Gbps. Here is a handy list of line speeds.
Contrast this with the best VSAT price that the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa has been able to negotiate on behalf of African universities of about $2400 dollars Mbps per month for an entire transponder, which was itself a huge drop from an average of $15000 dollars per Mbps that many universities were paying prior to this. As little as 2 years ago TENET were paying Telkom $4000 per Mbps per month for its access to SAT3. ResearchICTAFrica report in their Sector Performance Review of South African telecoms that in a cross-country comparison, Telkom have been found to be charging up to 800% more than their counterparts in other countries for access to SAT3.
All that to say that Seacom and the other undersea fibre initiatives are bringing a tectonic shift in competition and pricing for Internet access to the region. Standby for significant knock-on effects in the telecommunications industry in general. I have a particular soft spot for Seacom as they have embraced Research and Education networking for African universities as part of their corporate social responsibility program offering below-cost access for African universities. This is surely caressing the hand that feeds! Right-on Seacom!
In the spirit of the previous post consolidating information on African undersea cables, I compiled the image at the right to create a consolidated picture of existing and future cable initiatives around the continent. The relative cable sizes are roughly to scale according to the advertised capacity of the cables. There is certainly a contrast between the various initiatives.
Notable absences here are the Uhurunet and Infraco initiatives, not to mention Flag’s Next-Generation-Network or Main One. If anyone has maps of proposed routes for these initiatives, I would love to hear about it. I also have this map in an SVG file in which all the elements are scalable vector graphics, ideal for editing or adding to. You’ll have to post a comment or email me to ask for though as there appears to be a bug in the file uploading on the blog.
As Mark Twain once said, “reports of my death were great exaggerated”. This could be very aptly applied to the optimistic perception that the Internet and cheap telecommunications meant that it didn’t matter where you were, the so-called “death of geography”. The future was in telework and invisible global supply chains. While there is truth to the flat world notion popularised by Thomas Friedman, it is equally true that “local” has become more important than ever. Strangely the more connected we become, the more local seems to matter.
In Wired magazine, Tim Harford of Undercover Economist fame writes an article entitled How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next Cubicle. He highlights a number of studies which point to the Internet, email in particular, being most critically used for local communication whether within a company or within a community/town/city. He gives online dating as a classic example of an Internet phenomenon whose success is based on proximity (Russian brides excepted :). I interpret this article informal reinforcement for the village telco concept.
Put this in the context of an emerging body of evidence on the key role that cities play in innovation and economic growth and I think what you get is a critical need for cities to take basic information infrastructure on as a key strategic issue.
A similar point is made in the Economist article The Fading Lustre of Clusters in which one consultant summarizes 20 years of research into innovation by saying “Companies, not regions, are competitive. So the question for government is: how to attract many competitive firms?” Easy access to inexpensive, high-speed telecoms is one essential ingredient.
Recent Comments