Investment opportunities abound as internet prices drop, SEACOM

Investment opportunities for the future in East and North Africa as a result of increasing access to high capacity bandwidth revolve around cloud computing, business process outsourcing (BPO) and content management, a SEACOM official has said.
Julius Opio, SEACOM’s head of sales said the future is also in the areas of managed services, e-Commerce, e-Health, e-Government and e-Learning as bandwidth capacity has improved greatly with prices down as well.
“The impact of high capacity bandwidth and solutions will dramatically shift the way we learn, conduct business and bridge the knowledge gap in Kenya and across the region hence enabling communities to unleash their creative potential and seamlessly integrate into the information driven global economy,” Opio said.
SEACOM was the very first undersea fibre optic cable to go live on the eastern side of Africa. Since then, two other broadband fibre optic cables have been completed.
Cloud computing is still very new to Africa while a lot is happening around the area of business process outsourcing while content management is an area of debate in the academia and has huge potential to especially get African content online.
Opio was making a presentation titled ‘Fibre optic technology and its impact in East and North Africa at a media meet in Nairobi as SEACOM, the very first submarine fibre optic cable to land on the eastern seaboard of Africa, prepares to celebrate two years since it went live in June 2009.
Opio said improved Internet connectivity and communication because of fallen capacity prices is continuing to create a lot of employment opportunities for the youth who are now developing products and marketing them online to wider markets.
Opio said since SEACOM went live, internet users in markets like Kenya registered a 10.9 percent growth from 7.8 million users in 2010 to 8.6 million users by the first quarter of 2011, quoting data availed by the Communications Commission of Kenya.
He said it is expected that mobile phones shall continue to dominate the provision of internet service.
Opio said the mobile internet numbers strongly imply that the telecommunications sector is entering an era of a digital revolution like never before and consumers are spending more time online, with half of the users getting online via their mobile phones.
Since the activation of SEACOM’s high capacity bandwidth, multinationals from around the world including software developers from the United States, global telecommunication companies, banking firms from South Africa have made additional investments in the region.
This Opio said is because they are confident of reliable internet connectivity that can support their businesses anywhere in the region to distance offices across the globe.
In the small and medium enterprises sector, which makes up more than 80 percent of enterprises almost anywhere you will go in Africa, Opio said there is now a growing need to outsource IT services such as managed premises for data hosting and network security as a result of increased bandwidth capacity.
There is also growing need for small and medium enterprises to outsource ITsoftware services such as payroll, enterprise resource planning (ERP), human resource and customer relations management among others.
Opio said operator-billed services revenues across the Africa & Middle East region are expected to rise to more than $107 billion in 2013.
Growth he said will be driven by mobile data services, decline in voice revenues to be partially offset by an increase in data revenues, both among 2.5G and 3G customers.
Mobile data services he said are expected to contribute 24 percent of operator-billed service revenues in 2013, against just 9 percent in 2008.
Jackie Mwai, SEACOM’s regional sales manager said that over the last two years, SEACOM has provided internet services to 75 education and research institutions in Kenya.
Mwai said education institutions have made large savings on access as prices have dropped from $2400 per megabit before SEACOM’s entrance. Today, SEACOM charges educational institutions in the region $300 per megabit.
Mwai said universities and research centers in Kenya he said now connect using SEACOM capacity to global education networks such as ENREN in South Africa and Europe. This he added is facilitating the use of information exchange platforms globally for E-learning purposes.
Universities previously using 64Kbps now use over 10Mbps (growth of about 1600 fold in one year) of high speed broadband capacity.
Meanwhile, SEACOM will grow its network by venturing into war-torn Somalia, Africa’s soon-to-be-youngest nation South Sudan and Burundi, which today have no fibre connectivity.