serendipityoucity

I am slowly learning about cables and I find them quite fascinating. Especially after reading Mother Earth Mother Board by Neal Stephenson. The article provided a context for me to grasp the magnitude of these artifacts in an accessible story telling type of language. 

SAT-3 is operated by a state-owned and private telecommunications providers consortium of 36 shareholders. It runs along the west coast of Africa which began operations in 2001 picking up from SAT-2. It is a submarine communications cable

linking Portugal and Spain to South Africa, with connections to several West African countries along the route. It forms part of the SAT-3/WASC/SAFE cable system, where the SAFE cable links South Africa to Asia. The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE system provides a path between Asia and Europe for telecommunications traffic that is an alternative to the cable routes that pass through the Middle East, such as SEA-ME-WE 3 and FLAG. (Wikipedia)

I came across it while reading an article in Science and Development Net entitled Scholars call for communications cable access which discusses the fact that the monopoly on this cable is over in June this year which could open access to the Internet to new players.

Apparently’

Africa has some of the highest costing international bandwidth on the planet. Building fibre connections should lower bandwidth costs. But despite the building of the SAT3/WASCSAFE fibre, the price of E1s on this route to the rest of the world remain at levels that are often above their satellite equivalents (MYADSL.co.ca).

These high cost are associated with

three recurring issues: the impact of the monopoly on landing stations; the monopoly on the sale of capacity; and the fact that shares in the consortium are not tradeable. In Europe, European Competition policy talks about fair access for all users. Unfortunately in Africa there is no continental competition institution and at present there is only competition legislation in South Africa. In other words except for South Africa it would be difficult to mount a competition challenge because the legislation does not currently exist.(MYADSL.co.ca)

The Ghana-based Association of African Universities (AAU) is requesting that a portion of the lines be given away at discounted prices to universities and that this should be part of the new licensing agreements.  According to the article, currently,

18,000 students and 1,000 teachers are using the same amount of bandwidth as an American household

The communication infrastructure involves so much geography, so many nations and tons of material. Mostly we do not think of all these cables, who builds them, who owns them, nor how licenses, regulation and the like are so extremely influencial in how access is distributed.  What is incredible, is that nations somehow are capable to work together and negotiate, pay for, build and maintain these complex socio-technological systems.  In this case not in a very clever way but agree they did! Infrastructures are more than just technology!