Fibre for Africa
The consensus seems to be that Africa needs more land and submarine links to provide enough bandwidth for its long-term growth, and bring down satellite Internet costs.
East Africa currently depends completely on expensive satellite bandwidth. There are several projects in progress to lay submarine cables down the east and west coasts, and it can be difficult to keep track of them all.
Luckily, Steve Song has drawn an excellent map here. I'm linking it here to help people find it (including myself, next time I need that map).
We also need overland connections to help bring that bandwidth to landlocked countries, to help them share and compete with each other, and to network rural areas. Fibre, copper and microwave are the traditional and expensive options, O3B wants to provide a satellite alternative, but the TIER group's WiLDNet project has the most disruptive potential in my view, potentially replacing microwave links with something that's a hundred times cheaper and can be bought off the shelf.
TIER also wants to see their technology used to provide international bandwidth and compete with the undersea cables:
The vision is to connect Gilbraltar, which has low-cost world-class bandwidth and hosting, overland via long-distance Wifi through Morocco/Algerian, Mali, Burkina Faso, to Ghana. This means crossing the Sahara, which is certainly not trivial. (Timbuktu is roughly on this path.) The article said 6 Mb/s, but I am thinking something much higher. Although this is a crazy idea, I think it is much cheaper than many proposed projects, and if it worked you could grow the network over time and also increase BW for busy links, even moving to fiber once you have the traffic to pay for it.
I think that whilst it's important to ensure people don't get any illusions that there are a magical techno-fixes for their problems if you aren't physically connected it is a substantial problem. There are a number of people who are skeptical about the idea that you can *just add bandwidth* - and they are right, as long as that argument doesn't go so far as to say bandwidth is irrelevant.
Permalink for the African Undersea Cables map is now at http://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables/ -Steve