Rwanda braces itself for Broadband Internet

In 2004, I spent a summer in Rwanda working for Terracom, the ISP that laid down the fiber mentioned in the end of this video. My friend Sean and I carried the fiber splicer used for the initial rollout as a carry-on.

From my biased and limited perspective, the challenges in bringing internet access to Rwanda are hardly technological, but overwhelmingly political.

I'd rather not go into the details of the political problems here. But here are some things I'm pretty sure are true and partial causes to The Problem of Bringing Internet to Rwanda:

- Rwanda has a very unreliable power infrastructure. I remember standing on the roof of building that Terracom was in, watching a blackout roll across the city.

- Last time I checked, there was no IX in Rwanda.

- Terracom deployed a very extensive fiber network. But, much like the fiber network owned by the City of San Francisco, this network is hardly used. Most of the schools have unplugged equipment racked in a closet.

- The cell phone network in Rwanda is amazing, I was very upset when I returned to the pathetic offerings in the United States. Shortly after I left, Terracom and MTN both offered high speed links over their cell networks, but ...

- Because it is a land locked country. Getting high bandwidth, low latency connectivity is capital 'H' Hard. Satellite links are expensive, and have a minimum of 1000 ms latency. Running fiber to the coast and tapping in to a undersea cable is out of the question. See also: o3bnetworks.com

Excellent find, and much more detailed than most BBC articles. The scope of both the challenges and the opportunities is sobering. I think they're on the right track to push for information structure in parallel with other kids, rather than following the sequential path history suggests.

I note there's a co-credit on the graphic for the Shuttleworth Foundation. Anyone know their involvement?

Great, but first, I believe that Rwandans should be coaxed into fewer children per family (my mom is from Rwanda, so I know my fair share about this). There's just not a large enough surplus of wealth to really sustain this. There are people who live in houses smaller than your bathroom (6ft. x 6ft. x 6ft.), with 1 mother and 2 toddlers. That's not ok. Sure, it'd be great if Kigali would have broadband, but the government should take care of its people, then its computers.

Although, I do agree with it being called the fastest recovering country in Africa. But then, maybe I'm just biased ;)