Liberia struggles to get online

Liberia is working to improve its internet connections. Here journalists watch vote tallies at the National Elections Commission in Monrovia, Liberia, Oct. 12, 2005. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

MONOVIA, Liberia — It's mid afternoon in a sweaty office in downtown Monrovia. The ‘load’ icon spins furiously in the top right corner of the screen, trying desperately to bring up the home page. Two minutes after typing the url into the browser, most of the text on the landing page has appeared. At 4:25, almost all of the small photos had loaded, and at 11:54, the lead photo and sidebar ads finally appeared in full, the spinning icon on the top finally stopping just after the 12-minute mark.

This is the reality of internet use in much of West Africa, where IT infrastructure lags behind international norms. Even in South Africa — which is significantly ahead of the continent’s technological curve — an IT company pitted a carrier pigeon strapped with a 4 GB USB memory stick against their internet connection: The pigeon traveled the 60 miles before 4% of the file had loaded.

In Liberia, sending even a 4 MB file can be an onerous task on a good connection. It's impossible in the public internet cafes.

Other African countries face similar challenges in developing their internet connections. Rwanda is working to become Africa's WiFi capital, while Tanzania is hoping a fiber optic cable connection will jump-start its internet usage. Zimbabwe's limited internet capabilities has not stopped Facebook from taking off. In Kenya, the internet helped concerned bloggers develop a cutting edge crowd-sourcing program to chart crises.

“Internet right now is actually a huge challenge,” stated Frans Joubert, CEO of the Liberia’s largest cellular provider, Lonestar Cell. A seasoned veteran of communications development in developing and post-conflict African nations, Joubert identifies the major problem as the inability to access modern IT infrastructure outside of the country.

This complaint is echoed by Ben Wolo, the Managing Director of LIBTELCO, a government-run entity that supplies internet and landline services and is at the forefront of developing Liberia's communication capacity.

“One of the biggest challenges we have right now with internet is bandwidth,” he explained from his office. “We don’t have access to any fiber connectivity with the rest of the world, [meaning that] all communication in and out of Liberia is done through satellite, and satellite is extremely expensive.”

The satellites transmit to and from high-speed connections all over the world. This means pages such as Google will often appear with subtext in Hebrew or Arabic — because that is where the default settings for the satellite host line sits. And although this information comes through the satellites painfully slowly, and fails regularly, it still comes at extremely high costs.

Wolo explains that a 1 Milllion Bits Per Second (‘1 Meg’) internet connection — a typical size for an American household — via satellite in West Africa costs anywhere from $US 6,000 — 10, 000 per month. In the United States, a user will pay approximately $50 per month for this same connection.

http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/africa/100108/liberias-internet-tries-get-speed