(East) Africa just had their global Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity sig­nif­i­cantly expanded. Edu­ca­tion appli­ca­tions are presently lim­ited to the ter­tiary sec­tor. How­ever, the promise of growth in Kenya and Tan­za­nia par­tic­u­larly is sig­nif­i­cant as costs fall. Ini­tially ISPs in this region have gone for higher band­width over cost reduc­tion. That said, if Inter­net access devel­op­ments fol­low mod­els estab­lished already in China and India, con­ven­tional ISPs aren’t going to deliver growth, mobile providers will.

Accord­ingly, the improved band­width sit­u­a­tion at the present pro­hib­i­tively expen­sive costs of ~$600/month for a good link is ulti­mately a bit irrel­e­vant if mobile tech deliv­ers last-mile infra­struc­ture and the mobile web enables e-commerce, social media par­tic­i­pa­tion, gov­er­nance, health­care and more. This isn’t a case for exist­ing ISPs to drop prices: they’ve def­i­nitely got a very good busi­ness case for leav­ing prices up but using the link to improve value while this is still a valu­able com­mod­ity. The only sig­nif­i­cant short-term chal­lenge to this comes, poten­tially, in the form of any gov­ern­ment pol­icy imple­mented. They might do well to inter­vene here and stim­u­late eco­nomic devel­op­ment by pro­mot­ing global con­nec­tiv­ity… but I sus­pect the inter­ests of estab­lished busi­ness and gov­ern­ment, if they resem­ble any­thing like those in Aus­tralia, coin­cide too sig­nif­i­cantly for such bold maneu­vers to ever come to fruition!

From a busi­ness stand­point, it makes sense to cap­ture these mar­kets with medium band­width tech­nolo­gies early. That said, the rel­a­tively lim­ited capac­ity of this addi­tional global link makes co-location essen­tial for any seri­ous engage­ment. What this rep­re­sents is an impor­tant in-road for low-outlay devel­op­ment of new mar­kets with sig­nif­i­cant par­al­lels to exist­ing prod­ucts (i.e. to English-speaking pop­u­la­tions with­out need for addi­tional infrastructure).

For East Africans, how­ever, this is much big­ger. Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity enables exports of inno­v­a­tive solu­tions, and, as social media uptake improves, of localised (l10n)/internationalised (i18n) solu­tions in response to this newly-visible Inter­net mar­ket seg­ment. The prob­lem of ghet­toi­sa­tion along lan­guage lines is not so promi­nent per­haps as a result of sig­nif­i­cant Anglo­phone influ­ence — Fran­coph­one Africa will, of course, engage in dif­fer­ent net­works because of lan­guage bar­ri­ers. Yet some ser­vices, Twit­ter per­haps emi­nent among them, have irra­tionally suc­ceeded inde­pen­dently of ‘native’ lan­guage (it remains at present offered only in Eng­lish and Japan­ese, despite sig­nif­i­cant Chi­nese mem­ber­ship, and, who can for­get, Iran­ian polit­i­cal application!) — while oth­ers (Face­book, to pick a sim­i­lar exam­ple) have lan­guished and been replaced by clones despite their lin­guis­tic plu­ral­ity (26 unique lan­guages last I recall hear­ing a count, includ­ing Eng­lish (Pirate) and many more seri­ous ones) — Xiaonei being but one exam­ple of this.

If lan­guage is not an issue, it is pos­si­ble other dis­par­i­ties will become divi­sive in the same way. Devel­op­men­tal bar­ri­ers in terms of soft­ware indus­try (a key dri­ver of domes­tic web inno­va­tion) and global trad­ing part­ners will steer usage in any num­ber of par­tic­u­lar direc­tions. For exam­ple, China’s inept attempts at achiev­ing inde­pen­dence from Microsoft soft­ware in the last decade have been effec­tively squashed by their ram­pant piracy sit­u­a­tion. Parts of east­ern Africa engage in lit­eral acts of piracy, but it’s prob­a­bly not indica­tive of an atti­tude towards or devel­oped indus­try against pro­tec­tion of intel­lec­tual prop­erty. If the crim­i­nal dis­tri­b­u­tion net­work doesn’t yet exist, and soft­ware adop­tion is insuf­fi­ciently mature, it’s entirely pos­si­ble that open source could win. This is naive, and based on the pre­sump­tion that Africa has, to date, existed in a vac­uum — but if we con­sider for a moment a day work­ing on a com­puter with­out Inter­net con­nec­tiv­ity, some­thing of the rad­i­cal dif­fer­ence between min­i­mal con­nec­tiv­ity and full-on broad­band enabled con­nec­tiv­ity begins to sink in.

One Aus­tralian com­men­ta­tor recently observed, in response to a dra­matic increase in aver­age per-capita band­width consumption/annum, that there are a num­ber of “tip­ping points” in Inter­net usage. For exam­ple, in the last 18 months, avail­abil­ity of online ser­vices as well as wider adop­tion of home broad­band has resulted in a mas­sive expan­sion of data trans­fers despite only a mar­ginal increase in aver­age con­nec­tion speed. Youtube and its ilk have entered a per­fect storm of grad­u­ally expand­ing con­nec­tiv­ity: it just so hap­pens that at cer­tain points, con­nec­tiv­ity results in usage peaks (which then plateau but don’t decline) as con­sumers dis­cover new ways of using the Inter­net to inter­act. This hap­pens with the tran­si­tion from dialup to always-on Inter­net, and it hap­pens again at cer­tain speed points – con­sider tabbed brows­ing as well as video on demand/what we now con­sider “band­width inten­sive” activities.

This could be a tip­ping point for eco­nomic devel­op­ment and global inte­gra­tion. Watch closely!