Africa making progress in Internet access

By Niclas Mika

CAIRO (Reuters) - Improving Internet access in Africa is a fight on several fronts -- building undersea cables, setting up regional exchanges and bridging the last mile to homes and businesses -- but the continent is making progress.

For example, Africa's mobile industry is booming -- subscribers grew by 33 percent over the past year -- and carriers say they will invest $50 billion over five years to boost cellphone coverage.

But more than 300 million people in rural parts of Africa are not yet covered by any mobile phone network, let alone one that would support Internet access, and the continent has only 35 million fixed telephone lines for almost a billion people.

The huge potential this presents has attracted foreign buyers from Britain's Vodafone to France Telecom, and recently India's Bharti Airtel expressed interest in buying Africa's top telecoms company MTN.

Much is at stake, not only for newcomers to the continent who need to balance political risks and opportunities, but also for Africa's economic development.

While Western consumers may associate slow download speeds primarily with the time it takes for a YouTube video to start playing, for African companies, the amount and cost of bandwidth available directly affect their ability to do business.

"Call centers in Kenya, for example -- their access cost is 10 times greater than in India, simply because of the bandwidth costs," Gabriel Solomon of wireless industry group GSMA told Reuters at the ITU Telecom Africa conference in Cairo.

Many in the industry believe that wireless Internet access will be key. But for the substantial part of Africa's population that lives on less than $1 a day, owning even a low-cost phone, much less one capable of accessing the Web, is out of reach.