Welcome to the 9th annual review of telecommunications infrastructure development in Africa. If anything has characterised 2022, it has been a sense of waiting and expectation. Waiting for the two super-sized undersea cables EQUIANO and 2AFRICA to finally go live and waiting for LEO satellite services to finally be available in African countries. 2023 will hopefully see that anticipation fulfilled on both fronts. Perhaps the one big exception to the sense of waiting has been, at long last, the successful auction of mobile spectrum in South Africa. While it has taken 12 years to finally come to fruition, the auction has been a big success by most standards. And with that, here follows my review of the highlights telecom infrastructure development in 2022, containing links to over 390 articles covering a range of African telecom infrastructure development issues.

Undersea Cables

There is a point when amazing things that happen repeatedly become simply banal. You would be forgiven for not being dazzled by new undersea cable announcements for African countries, given the number of cables that now encircle the continent.

However, there is a sea change underway in the world of African undersea cables. In December, the PEACE cable went live in Kenya and Egypt. The PEACE cable has a design capacity of 96 Tbps. That is by far the largest capacity cable to land on the continent. And that distinction will only last a few months as the EQUIANO cable is scheduled to go live in 2023, followed by the 2Africa cable in 2024. These two cables represent a collective design capacity of more than 320 Tbps. Together, these three undersea cables represent more capacity than all the existing undersea cables serving the continent put together. News about these cables in 2022 mostly related to announcements of landing points being established in key locations on the continent. The good news is that this massive increase in capacity is likely to drive down the price of international capacity. The bad news is that it is only like to happen in markets where those cables land. Poor countries that don’t represent a big enough market for these big cables may be further marginalised by ongoing high international capacity costs. It is also unclear how a shift from operator-led undersea cable consortia to cables largely financed by Silicon Valley giants will affect markets.

Undersea Cables

There is a point when amazing things that happen repeatedly become simply banal. You would be forgiven for not being dazzled by new undersea cable announcements for African countries, given the number of cables that now encircle the continent.

However, there is a sea change underway in the world of African undersea cables. In December, the PEACE cable went live in Kenya and Egypt. The PEACE cable has a design capacity of 96 Tbps. That is by far the largest capacity cable to land on the continent. And that distinction will only last a few months as the EQUIANO cable is scheduled to go live in 2023, followed by the 2Africa cable in 2024. These two cables represent a collective design capacity of more than 320 Tbps. Together, these three undersea cables represent more capacity than all the existing undersea cables serving the continent put together. News about these cables in 2022 mostly related to announcements of landing points being established in key locations on the continent. The good news is that this massive increase in capacity is likely to drive down the price of international capacity. The bad news is that it is only like to happen in markets where those cables land. Poor countries that don’t represent a big enough market for these big cables may be further marginalised by ongoing high international capacity costs. It is also unclear how a shift from operator-led undersea cable consortia to cables largely financed by Silicon Valley giants will affect markets.

African Undersea Cable News in 2022

Terrestrial Backbone Fibre

2022 saw continued significant investment in the spread of terrestrial fibre networks. Namibia’s Paratus emerged as a substantial regional player in in Southern Africa, with news of expansions in Botswana, DRC, and Zambia. Cross-border connectivity gaps continued to be filled, linking countries such as Cameroon with Chad and Sudan, Congo with CAR, Cameroon with CAR, and South Sudan with Djibouti (MoU). In spite of these investments, terrestrial fibre optic networks remain underutilised. Prices remain high and there is often a lack of transparency on pricing and availability of fibre optic networks. Indeed simply knowing where fibre optic infrastructure exists can be a challenge.

Happily, a consortium of organisations including Mozilla, ITU, the World Bank, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, CSquared, the Internet Society, and Digital Council Africa joined forces to address this lack of transparency by championing an Open Fibre Data Standard (OFDS) for accurately (and openly) describing terrestrial fibre network infrastructure. The standard (now in Beta) can be found on Github. There is also extensive documentation of the standard on the site as well. Much of my work in 2023 is going to be focused on engaging operators and telecommunication regulators in dialogue about this standard and transparency in general.

African Terrestrial Fibre Optic News in 2022

Fibre To The Home and OTT

One of the more surprising shifts in last mile technologies on the continent has been the speed at which Fibre To The Home (FTTH) has spread. The availability of high-capacity fibre optic backbones, increased affordability of last-mile fibre optic technologies, demand for remote video conferencing as a result of the pandemic, and the availability of a wide array of streaming media OTT services have all contributed to the acceleration of FTTH roll-out. Obviously this is only practical in urban areas but lessons from South Africa suggest that even quite small towns can make the case for FTTH.

FTTH and OTT are here together as a category because of the role that OTT companies and services play as a driver of the FTTH market. While it is encouraging to see the uptake of streaming media services, it is amazing to see the growth of African content thanks to investment from OTT giants like Netflix. Not to be left out, many telecom operators have launched their own streaming services but if recent history in South Africa is anything to go by, it may be better left to specialist service providers.

The success of OTT has implications for the broadcast sector in general. For countries engaged in the switchover from analogue to digital terrestrial broadcasting, one can only wonder whether the millions of dollars involved in the transition will ever be recouped if OTT continues to grow and dominate consumer media consumption. Countries like South Africa which are now very late to complete the digital switchover are in the invidious position of having to commit to a technology which may already have passed its prime.

African FTTH and OTT News in 2022

Licensed Spectrum

The challenge of making wireless spectrum available to mobile network operators in a manner that is fair to operators and yet which also addresses national strategic objectives did not get any easier in 2022. Notable releases of IMT spectrum included the long-awaited spectrum auction in South Africa, the auction of additional 5G spectrum licenses in Nigeria, and Tanzania’s auction of multiple frequencies.

What is wireless spectrum worth? Taking a look below at the sampling of prices paid for spectrum in 2022, it hard to see any sort of pattern. Naturally prices are affect by the amount of spectrum on offer and the specific frequency which may have characteristics better suited to urban broadband e.g. 3.5GHz or rural roll-out e.g. 700MHz. Spectrum prices are also affected by overall income levels in a country as well as the size of the addressable market. But it doesn’t stop there. The term of the license (10, 15, 25 years) will have a big impact on the prices as well as any roll-out obligations that are associated with the licenses. Last but not least, government desire for a treasury windfall can also have a significant effect on the reserve price of spectrum. All of these things shape the final outcome.

Year	Operator	Country	Spectrum	Price paid
2022	Vodacom	Tanzania	2x10MHz (700MHz)	$25M
2022	Telkom	South Africa	2x10MHz (800MHz)	$99M
2022	Airtel	Nigeria	100MHz (3.5GHz)	$273M
2022	Airtel	Tanzania	80MHz (3.5GHz)	$21M
2022	Airtel	Kenya	2x10MHz (2100MHz)	$20M

One thing is clear, given the millions and millions of dollars at stake, there is a real need for more transparency regarding the assignment of IMT spectrum by regulators and for more public-interest research on the impact of spectrum costs.

In other news in 2022, 5G deployments picked up pace in 2022 with notable roll-outs in Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Kenya, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Many other countries have trials underway. Without exception, these have been urban deployments and quite naturally aimed at the top end of the market where both demand for high-speed access and ability to pay is higher. It has caused some to question the utility of these deployments. Perhaps more attention needs to be given to inclusion and making broadband available and accessible by all citizens rather new technologies that cater to an elite that already have broadband access.

Unlicensed and Dynamic Spectrum

One of the interesting consequences of the pandemic has been the increase in demand for home internet services by those who needed to either work remotely and/or provide access to education services for their children. FTTH services (as mentioned above) have grown rapidly as a result but so have Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) services. WiFi has proven to be a very successful technology for FWA although many MNOs are also offering FWA in licensed bands. Indeed, most 5G offerings to date on the continent have been more FWA than individual mobile phone services. A key difference between mobile and FWA services seems to be that FWA is often offered as an uncapped service which is more suitable for household/business access where monitoring individual access may be impractical and/or undesirable.

African governments continue to see WiFi as a means of providing affordable public access to internet. The governments of Uganda, Mozambique and Kenya all made commitments in 2022 to roll out public WiFi services. Meanwhile, commercial WiFi service providers like Mawingu in Kenya and Tizeti in Nigeria quietly attracted more investment and expanded services in 2022.

The success of WiFi around the world has led to a push for more spectrum (in 6GHz) to be made available on a license-exempt basis. In the African region, South Africa led the way in December publishing draft regulations that would open up the lower half of the 6GHz band for license exempt use.

In the world of TV White Space spectrum, things were pretty quiet in the past year. South Africa was the only country that saw additional deployments of TVWS networks in 2022. I wrote about the challenges facing TVWS adoption in the region earlier in the year.

In somewhat disappointing news, Meta (Facebook) shut down their ExpressWiFi initiative which was working with ISPs around the world to create an affordable, high-performance WiFi platform for service providers. This follows on the heels of Alphabet (Google) shutting down a similar initative called Google Station in 2020. It is hard not to be somewhat cynical about the dilettantism of Silicon Valley giants who set out with grand ambitions to connect the world but quickly flush them as soon as profits dip. The image on the right is from what used to be the home page of internet.org. Somewhat ironically, that link now points to Meta’s ambitions for the Metaverse.

African WiFi & Dynamic Spectrum News 2022

Towers

Tower news this year is very similar to last year and the year before. MNOs continue to sell off their tower assets to tower companies. In theory, this is good news as tower companies represent neutral infrastructure to host more than one operator on their towers. Sometimes tower outsourcing can turn out to be too much of a good thing in cases where there is consolidation of tower operators, leading to claims of monopoly. Unfortunately it is very difficult to say anything concrete about the impact of tower companies on the continent as there is so little public information. It would be wonderful to better understand the extent to which MNO outsourcing to tower companies has an impact on overall infrastructure sharing. This lack of transparency is not a given. Regulators in Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and France all publish detailed public information on towers across their countries.

African Tower News in 2022

Datacentres

Undersea cables and terrestrial fibre can offer faster access to the global internet but the widespread establishment of datacentres in African countries is key to growing an Afro-centric internet. The good news is that fibre operators, cloud providers, and governments are all moving to invest in datacentres across the continent. Like terrestrial fibre, the accessibility and affordability of these datacentres will have a significant impact on their uptake and ultimately their impact. Cloud-based access technologies like OpenRAN will succeed or fail in the region based on the availability and affordability of cloud infrastructure.

African Datacentre News in 2022

Satellite

The Starlink LEO satellite constellation began offering broadband services in 2021 and now claims over a million customers globally. I think many were optimistic that Starlink might be available in some African countries in 2022 but that doesn’t seem to have come to pass. Several countries, including Nigeria, Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia have confirmed regulatory approval of Starlink. Starlink appears to be accepting pre-orders even in countries where approval has not yet been granted. One news report claimed Starlink would be operational in Nigeria before the end of 2022 but there doesn’t appear to be any actual evidence of this.

The big question is what will Starlink charge for services and hardware in Africa, and what its terms of service will be. One report suggests that the cost of the satellite terminal in Nigeria will be only $99 and the monthly fee would be about $43, in contrast to the $599 terminal cost and $99 monthly fee charged in the United States.

As a single user/household consumer technology, Starlink will only be of interest to the comparatively wealthy. However, as a small-ISP backhaul technology, Starlink could have a significant impact on affordable rural access. Time will tell whether they will allow / encourage this use of the technology.

Meanwhile, competitor OneWeb has been busy making deals on the continent as well. They have built a gateway in Ghana and partnered with Paratus to build one in Angola as well. They have also partnered with Airtel on a plan to offer services in 14 African countries. As yet, OneWeb is not yet operational. Estimates suggest that commercial service will only become available towards the end of 2023.

Not to be left out, Lightspeed (another LEO constellation in the works from Canadian satellite operator Telesat) have announced a cooperation with Liquid Intelligent Technologies. Because they are more focused on corporate customers, OneWeb and Telesat might be a better fit for rural Africa as a backhaul option for ISPs and MNOs. However, it seems as if Starlink will be offering services long before either of them and may adapt to fit that market.

GEO satellite service providers have not been idle either. Eutelsat have partnered with Liquid Intelligent Technologies to offer broadband services in Uganda, South Sudan, and DRC. Viasat have partnered with Microsoft to offer satellite broadband services in Nigeria and DRC and possibly Senegal and Angola as well. Meanwhile, Intelsat have partnered with MTN to extend services in South Sudan. All of these initiatives involve new generation High Throughput Satellites (HTS) that are capable of delivering real broadband services albeit with higher latency than LEO satellite services.

African Satellite Broadband News in 2022

Miscellaneous

Last but not least is a grab bag of news that did not fit into an obvious category. Most of it is telecoms-focused but I have cast the net a bit wider where it seemed interesting.

Notable in 2022 was the rise of Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) operators. These are operators / manufacturers that specialise in the design and operation of low-cost, energy-efficient, rural GSM networks. Africa Mobile Networks (AMN), NuRAN Wireless, and Vanu are the major players in this space. They partner with existing MNOs to offer turnkey rural access networks in exchange for a share of revenue. 2022 saw Orange partnering with Vanu in Cote D’Ivoire and NuRAN partnering with MTN in Namibia. Later in the year NuRAN signed a broader framework agreement with MTN to offer services across the Middle East and Africa. Meanwhile AMN secured a $20M round of investment. Huawei is also a player in this space with a product called RuralStarPro. They have partnered with the Ghanaian government to roll out over 2000 rural cell sites.

Meta came under fire in Africa in 2022 and not just for shutting down ExpressWiFi. Facebook’s outsourcing of content moderation came under scrutiny as did their failure to adequately address misinformation. And long overdue from my perspective, researchers and journalists began to look at Meta’s “free” internet initiatives from Free Basics to zero-rating of apps like WhatsApp.

As a counterpoint, it was encouraging to see startups like South Africa’s MoyaApp emerging as a home-grown alternative to global messaging giants. From a policy/regulatory perspective, why would you allow the zero-rating of apps and services from global internet giants, thereby ensuring that domestic messaging startups will always face an uphill battle?

Miscellaneous African Telecom News in 2022

And that’s it! Naturally a review like this is subject to my own biases. What do you think deserved more emphasis in 2022? What did I miss? For interest, of the more than 140 news sources consulted for this review, here are the top ten news sources. Obviously there is a heavy English-language bias. Who should I be paying more attention to?

Publication	# of articles referenced
ITWeb Africa	58
Ecofin Agency	32
TechCentral	23
Developing Telecoms	22
Capacity Media	13
Telegeography Comms Update	12
TechCabal	11
Agence Ecofin	9
Broadcast Media Africa	9
ITWeb South Africa	8

This work would not have been possible without the support of the Mozilla Corporation and the Association for Progressive Communications

Posted by Steve Song