If you are attending the Rhino Charge, its not too late to RSVP on the Facebook event page,, kindly do so as the number of confirmed attendees will determine how many saplings will be made available. The District Officer has pledged to provide a sapling for each person who RSVP’s and shows up.
DATE: 1st June 2009
TIME: 10:30 am – 01:30 pm
LOCATION: Narasha Forest right behind the district forest office at Eldama Ravine.
DIRECTIONS: At the town, turn right after the Kobil gas station (DO NOT proceed towards Maji Mazuri – Timboroa – Eldoret Rd), through the town along the Ravine – Kamwosor – Kaptagat – Eldoret Road. After the river/bridge drive about 0.7 kms from town center on your left sign board, M.E.N.R. Eldama Ravine Forest Station.

I applaud the organizing team, lead by Gerald Chelelgo, the contributions of Kipkorir Chemirmir, and last but not least, the District Forest Officer Timon Mboga.

The idea of coming together during social events to do something positive for the environment is so inspiring to me, and I hope to join Gerald for the next excursion, and to incorporate this in future events i am involved in.

CC licensed photo by Leo Reynolds on Flickr

The 3 SAT3 countries of South Africa, Egypt and Senegal could be said to have fibre optic connections to the rest of the world or what others may call ‘true broadband’, the rest of the countries in Africa have to contend with VSAT connections or have their internet traffic routed through the above named SAT3 countries.

In the case of Kenya, fibre has been laid by companies such as Kenya Data Networks for communication within the country. The problem has been connecting Kenya to the rest of the world. That is where the bottleneck has been. The government of Kenya has been laying cable in many parts of the country, so is just a matter of time before high speed internet access is made available to urban areas and even smaller towns.

Do note the VSAT connections can have broadband-like speeds, so what we should look at is the connection costs and amount of bandwidth available.
For example, an E1 line (equivalent to the American T1) of 2 Mbps to ISPs costs 4000 USD in Ghana, Benin, Nigeria, 7000 USD in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, 32,000 USD in Cameroon, 25,000 USD in SA.

In residential access Telkom Orange charges about 5990 Ksh (approx. 75 dollars) for home access line of 256 kpbs downloads and 128 kpbs uploads per month. Many people use the Huawei wireless modems E220, E160 particularly in Nairobi with the 3G connections, utilizing a pay-as-you-go plan. Kenyan readers, how much do you pay for your internet access? what kind of speed do you get? Do you have a preferred service provider?

By and large, broadband access is very expensive. There are also other projects like TEAMS and EASSY (Quasi-Govt. consortium: Telkom Kenya/Orange is a member, as is Safaricom and Econet) that plan to connect parts of Africa to the rest of the world by Fibre optic Cable. So far SEACOM has arrived first and the prospect of having more competition could result in the cost coming down. Though that may indeed take time. For now, companies herald the arrival of SEACOM’s fibre optic line because it would mean an increase in productivity for businesses that depend on the internet. For example, there is a young businessman in Nairobi with an IT outsourcing company, with his relatively decent connection, he still has to wait for more than 5 minutes to download a 26MB file. In a few months with the SEACOM cable reaching Nairobi, the same download could take less than a minute and he can move on to other tasks. He has employees who often have to upload files via ftp to servers in the US. With the faster speeds it will make their jobs that much easier. He is not even too concerned about the cost right now, the overarching benefit is well…broadband.

CC licensed photo by Wesley Fryer on flickr

There are other factors such as open access, latency, and reliability, but talking about that would be tantamount to counting chicks before they hatch no?

As always, feel free to chime in with your thoughts in the comments or via twitter if you prefer to be pithy.

PS: To keep up with the African Telecommunications Union conference, Becky Wanjiku is live blogging from Port Louis, Mauritius.