High-Speed Internet Coming to Africa
If you're reading this in Africa, you're one of a few who can. With just 50 million web users across the continent, as few as 5% of Africans access the Internet, a rate far lower than in Asia, Europe or the Americas. In only a handful of African countries do more than 1% of the population use broadband services. (Among OECD countries, broadband penetration averages 18%.) And those services that exist don't come cheap. Broadband costs more in sub-Saharan Africa than anywhere else in the world: consumers in the region spent an average of $366 each month for speedier Internet access in 2006, according to the World Bank. Users in India, meanwhile, paid just $44. But large-scale efforts to connect the continent are picking up speed. On Sept. 9, O3b Networks — a Channel Islands-based telecoms company backed by Google, HSBC and U.S. cable TV operator Liberty Global — unveiled plans to offer cheap, high-speed Internet access via satellite to developing regions like Africa by the en...