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For many Internet users there is no question that the Internet is a good thing. It is not even a debateable issue for them. The average information addicted netizen, will say "Of course the Internet is good for Eritrea...It brings information, and information is power and money...which Eritrea needs!" While for many in Eritrea the question seems irrelevant: 95% of Eritreans have no computer access, and even if they had computer access they may never afford Internet access. So who cares?
The assumption of this analysis, is that there are three requirements which if met, will make Internet services feasible and highly desireable in Eritrea. The first is that it is a good investment and it makes money for Eritrea. If it makes money for Eritrea without any subsidy, then it is contributing to Eritrea's economic growth and development. The second requirement is that it be accessible to almost any Eritrean with access to a computer and a modem no matter what their economic level. The third requirement for Internet in Eritrea is that is trikes an optimal balance between price and performance for the average user--delivering reasonably good service at a low price if possible. We assume that if these three requirements are met, then everyone agrees that Internet connectivity is good for Eritrea.
(There are other concerns like people accessing objectionable or pornographic content. These problems are very easy to solve technically by setting access restrictions at the international connection. Policy is more of the question with those issues)
We of the Eritrea Technical Exchange (a non-profit support project in California, USA), wish to present for Eritrea and Eritreans, a detailed technical description and plan of how the Internet can be brought to Eritrea in a way that will completely fulfill the three requirements and resolve most questions and concerns about Internet access in Eritrea.
The main innovations of the plan that we develop are as follows:
Our organizational model for such email development combines foreign volunteer technical support, and local commercial operation of the system by national businesses. A second component of the model, has been to use--at least initially--some margin from the commercial sale of email services to subsidize access for public or selected governmental institutions.
At first, there were doubts of whether or not email was good or even legal in Eritrea. But the success and efficiency of the email system in practice has resolved these doubts. Some of this involved showing people throughout the public sector that email was a good and useful service. This was done by providing people with free email accounts for a period so that they could see its benefits.
Furthermore, Eritrea may take pause from Ethiopia's experience with Internet development. The service there was soon oversubscribed, and it has been plagued by slow performance, high cost, and low efficiency.
The Ethiopian solution to the Internet access problem is far from optimal. The reason is that average price/performance is poor, and there is only a few price/performance options in an economically very diverse market. The solution is to increase the overall performance of the system (through efficiency improvements), and to provide a wide economic range of Internet use options for the local market. These solutions can and should be included in Eritrea's implementation of Internet.
The Internet is a type of Wide Area Network or WAN. What a WAN does deliver packets of information or data to potentially distant computers over a wide range of interconnected computer networks. These networks may be of widely different types. But technical standards and rules have been developed for the delivery of such packets. These standards make the efficient operation of WAN's possible. The standard or protocol used on the Internet is called TCP/IP which stands for the Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol.
Computers can be either directly or indirectly connected to the Internet. Indirectly connected computers use an intermediary, or "proxy" computer to get data from the Internet on their behalf. Directly connected computers must have a unique IP (or Internet Protocol) address which is a series of four numbers, each between 0 and 255 noninclusive.
National Internet connections must have at a minimum two components. One is the local Internet Service Provider that provides the different servers and computers that the users use for calling in, storing and retrieving email, hosting web sites, etc. And the other is the Network Backbone Provider. This is the institution that provides the international data connection, and central network management.
For Eritrea, the international data connection will probably be a satellite line, probably a VSAT connection of some sort. An expensive VSAT connection of moderate capacity (256 kilobits/sec, which is equivalent about eight good quality phone lines), costs up to US$20,000 per month to rent. Probably more than half of this price is what the Eritrean phone company may charge to make its side of the connection.
In order to bring Internet to Eritrea, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) would have to be set up in Eritrea with the appropriate computers, servers, phone lines, modems, access servers, and network equipment. And then the ISP would connect its network to the VSAT link. The other end of the VSAT connection would go to an appropriate US, European or Asian ISP who would charge a fee of $500 to $1500 per month to connect the VSAT to its network and the Internet.
Once the ISP and the VSAT connection are in place, the Eritrean computer user would access the internet by making his computer call up the ISP's Internet access number. When the call is made, a connection would be established and the user could start getting or sending information. This would include receiving and sending email, and perhaps looking up the latest news, or looking up information at potentially a wide range of sites.
Different types of Internet use make very different demands on the network. Electronic mail (email) makes relatively few demands on the network. The data volumes are relatively small (about 5 Megabytes per day for Eritrea at the moment). And if it takes an hour or two for a message to be delivered, it is generally OK. It is easy for the network to provide slow data transfer for low volumes of data.
Meanwhile web-browsing can make significant demands on the network. And a single page of information may be 0.1 Megabytes or more. Furthermore most people will not want to wait for more than half a minute to minute for the information to be displayed on their screens. Only 50 people downloading one page each can conceivably require as much data transfer as the entire country's email system in one day. And each user may wish to have their data transfered at a rate of 2-3 kilobytes per second. This can make tremendous demands on a network which has a limited international connection.
For international web browsing over a limited international connection, one must have either very few users, or very slow data transfer (i.e. it may take several minutes for a page with a lot of graphics to be displayed). This is the fundamental delemma of Internet access in remote locations with limited telcommunications infrastructure.
Eritrea's computer communications market is diverse. At one extreme are international business people who need to connect at the Internet at speeds which are only limited by the modem in their laptop. At the other end are poor students for whom 100 Nacfa (US$ 15) per month is a big expense.
For business people, their alternative is making an international phone call to Europe or the U.S. and connecting to a service provider there. Such a call would cost $2-$3 per minute originating from Eritrea and $1-$2 per minute originating from outside Eritrea. On such a connection, a user can obtain transfer speeds of 2-4 kilobytes/sec. Their main requirement of an Eritrean Internet service, would be U.S.-level service at a price that is cheaper than the alternative of making an international call to a foreign ISP. If our target price is 1/4 the cost of an international dial-up connection, then $0.25 to $0.50 per minute is a potentially acceptable price for top quality Internet access.
For the poor students, their main market demand is acceptable access at rock bottom prices. They would probably want at least several hours of Internet use for their hard-earned 100 Nacfa. If we say this corresponds to a little over 20 minutes per day, then we have 750 minutes for $15, or $0.02 per minute of use. And if they get a few hundred pages of information per month, they will probably be pretty happy though.
Therefore, the 'ability to pay' for the different components of the Eritrean market varies by a factor by more than an order of magnitude. This is simply a reflection of the fact that per-capita incomes in Eritrea are less than 1/100-th what they are in the richer more developed countries. Ideally, an Eritrean Internet can satisfy the different demands of both expatriot and local users.
Bandwidth & operation: $20,000 per month (five times the capital cost). Here if we can get 40 businesses and business people to use the high performance connections for 40 minutes each day, then all of the bandwidth cost is paid for. In reality, we will have these two extremes, and a bunch of mid-performance connections in between.
The mid-range rate if it is to recover all fo the cost, must recover about $25,000 per month. Which for 500 users is $50/month. Anyone with such an account, if credited with 25 hours of access at $2.00 per hour. We could probably set a high-speed access class which has 5 times the mean transfer rate, and charge $10.00 per hour on those lines. Then we can set a low-cost access class at 1/5 the priority and 1/4 the cost at $10/month and $0.50 per hour of connect time. And we can set different classes in between.