The Future of Broadband in the Gambia

The Gambia has just licenced a new Operator in the GSM industry, Globacom. Glo is a Nigerian telecommunication company who is also the sole owner of the GLO-1 submarine communications cable system running along the west coast of Africa between Nigeria and the UK with a 2.5Tbps ultimate capacity. The 9,800km cable stretches from the UK across West Africa and has landing points in Nigeria, London and Lisbon, connecting 17 countries to the rest of the world.

The licence will allow Globacom to land this gigantic trans-Atlantic submarine cable, Glo 1, in the Gambia with opportunities to extend the infrastructure to neighboring countries as well. It also gives the company the right to carry traffic for major operators, the government and wholesale customers in Gambia.
Most people are asking, with a population of 1.7 million, what do we need 5 GSM operators for? Well I believe these GSM companies did their maths and saw the benefits of being in the Gambia even if we don’t. For instance, Glo’s aim is to be the biggest and best telecom operator in Africa, it has licences in six other countries Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Benin Republic and Cote d’Ivoire. They are still pursuing 10 more licences around the sub region. They started operations in Nigeria in August, 2003, and in Benin in June 2008 and recently concluded plans to roll out services in Ghana.

African nations suffer from resource gap between urban and rural areas, low levels of education, the brain drain of educated citizens to wealthier regions of the world, and limited road, air, and rail transport networks. Furthermore, the business climate is risky due to small markets, non transparent systems of governance, time-consuming business procedures.
I believe Modern communications systems would alleviate many of these problems. It is clear from the Forum on Telecom/ ICT Regulation and Partnership in Africa (FTRA) meeting I attended last week at Kairaba hotel that most African nations and their investors and multi-lateral partners are racing to connect nations, towns, and people to broadband and mobile telephony as a means to stimulate economic prosperity and drastically increase human and social capital. (More details on the FTRA meeting will be posted later)

It was announce at the meeting that there will be five more fiber cables arriving in Africa, some operational by the second quarter of 2012. the latest addition is the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) submarine communications cable which is a planned cable system along the west coast of Africa between France and South Africa. This will be the first international submarine cable to land in Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania, Namibia, Sao Tome and Principe and Sierra Leone. Other countries benefiting from the ACE project include Angola, Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, France, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Portugal, Senegal, South Africa and Spain (Tenerife). This cable has an overall potential capacity of 5.12 Tb/s, and will support the new 40 Gb/s technology from day one.
We are all optimistic that the cable will bring about lower cost of broadband services and abundant bandwidth to drive businesses for the next 25 years. You’ll notice I mention The Gambia from the list of countries getting a Landing point from the ACE cable. We are making a bold move in signing up for another landing point which will end our dependency to Sonatel of Senegal for international bandwidth. Unfortunately the status quo in the Gambia remains the same, or looks like its not going to change, as Gamtel is put forth to run and manage the landing station meaning every other ISP and Operator will go to them for bandwidth. This will only see us having a lot of bandwidth availability but little or no changes in the current broadband prices.
The Gambia’s Gamtel have also announced plans to upgrade the existing fiber network in the south bank of the Gambia to a next generation network (NGN) and run a new NGN fiber network in the Northern part of the Gambia of about 800km. This project will cost about $l8million. The North bank of The Gambia will be soon for the first time, be accessing telecommunication services through a fiber network.
According to Katim Touray, the current Managing Director and CEO of GAMTEL's Board and management, The NGN project is designed to provide the security and contingencies required to minimise the undesirable effect of Service outages due to fiber cuts mostly due to road works. Upon the completion of this project, the two main switches in Banjul and Serrekunda which were installed in the early 90s will be replaced with IP-based switches enabling the provisioning of new and enhanced services to Gamtel customers.
I believe that this is an opportunity for the Gambia to liberalise the Broadband industry, which will encourage competition and promote innovative services. Ghana is an example of an African country that liberalised the monopoly on their broadband service; Ghana is a beneficiary of at least four submarine cables, which brought about cheap access to broadband services for high rates of bandwidths.
This is an area where our Public Utilities and Regulatory Authority (PURA) could step in and advocate for an open market that promotes competition and infrastructure sharing.