By SubTel Forum
For a decade, West Africa's main connection to the Internet has been a single fiber-optic cable in the Atlantic, a tenuous and expensive link for one of the poorest areas of the planet. Â A recent AP article discusses how the Main One submarine cable has changed all that. Â It has more than five times the capacity of the old one and is set to bring competition to a market where wholesale Internet access costs nearly 500 times as much as it does in the U.S. Â Even with added international communications capacity, Africa still faces another problem: In many places, it doesn't have the fiber cables necessary to carry the signal from the shores inland, said Abiodun Jagun, a lecturer at South Africa's University of Witwatersrand.
