The Sunday Mail
Dr Dennis Magaya
THE world is becoming a tiny village – thanks to the internet. In Zimbabwe, the internet craze is fast catching up, but what exactly is this animal called the internet? Do we, as a people, know what we mean when we say “rega ndimboenda painternet or my internet is down?”
Let me try to unpack the internet.
The internet is a connected network of millions of computers which are distributed throughout the world. From a different perspective, the internet is a massive information storage and for a person to store information, they need access to the network servers. In practice, the storage space is bought from the cloud, google drive or can be a website.
In fact one of the reasons why social media such as Facebook is growing exponentially is because it gives any person with access to the internet an opportunity to get space to store, retrieve and share their content on the internet. There were about 850 000 Facebook accounts in Zimbabwe as of November 2015.
The internet’s size is increasing rapidly every day. For instance every second, the internet handles 6 000 tweets, more than 40 000 Google queries, and more than 2 million emails. Fortunately, the world computing capacity is increasing at a faster rate than the required storage. We therefore believe that the internet is sustainable because every 36 months, the world storage capacity doubles while every 18 months the computing capacity doubles.
There is a misconception that the World Wide Web (www) is the same as the Internet. In actual fact, the internet comprises of the www, email, FTP, Usenet newsgroups, gopher etc. The www describes documents formatted in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language) which that allows you to move from one document to another simply by clicking on hot links.
The internet is a global network of computers and each computer is assigned a unique address when it connects. This address is known as an Internet Protocol (IP) address. According to Washington Post there are 4,3 billion IP addresses in the world (as at the end of 2015).
The number of IP addresses per capita is a good measure of the extend to which a country is capable of utilising the digital economy. In Zimbabwe there are 179 people per every IP address while in the USA its 5 IP addresses per person. This means Zimbabwe has 81 000 IP addresses.
The Internet is a distributed network of computers that performs three broad functions namely, stores, communicates and computes information. As a result, one of the most difficult questions to answer is “How big is the internet?” The size can be measured in terms of users, number of websites, the storage capacity, number of servers or the traffic that is carried by the internet.
The easiest measure is in terms of the number of users. As of December 2015, there were 3,26 billion internet users in the world which is equivalent to 40 percent of the world population. The Asian continent has 48,4 percent of global internet users. Zimbabwe has 6,7 million internet users as of November 2015.
Its estimated that there are 75 million internet servers and 4,66 billion Web pages online in the world, but this number may be off by up to a factor of five. In very simple terms, we need about 305,5 billion pages of paper to print the whole Internet.
We measure the communication capacity in terms of the amount of information that it is capable of transferring from one point to the other. By the end of 2016, global Internet traffic will reach 1,1 zettabytes per year, according to Cisco. One zettabyte is the equivalent of 36 000 years of high-definition video or the streaming Netflix’s entire catalogue 3 177 times. It’s difficult to comprehend some of these measurements jargon. The easier way is to read it to mean, its very very very big.
The majority of the internet content is in the USA. As a country, we are therefore net importers of the internet content. The total internet volume consumption in Zimbabwe was 1 208 379 GB in 2015. Currently the bulk of the internet comes via undersea cables and or via the satellite.
When it comes via the undersea cable it lands at the sea and is carried into the country through fibre networks. The Internet Access Providers (IAP) buy it at the boarders where the average landed price is between US$50 to $70 per MB per second. The internet is then sold to telecommunications operators, ISPs who then sell it to consumers.
The price that consumers pay covers that cost of the internet carriers networks, internet switching points and undersea cable owned by various upstream companies. Most importantly, it covers the cost incurred by the telecommunications company that you use to access the network.
In Zimbabwe, the consumer price of data is US$0,045 per MB. The key drivers of costs are firstly, the wholesale price that Mobile operators and ISPs pay and secondly the telecommunications operators or ISP internal cost structure which is a function of infrastructure required to provide the internet and the operational expenses.
Some telecommunications operators pay up to 4 times higher than the average wholesale price. This naturally causes the consumer data prices to be unnecessarily high. The problem is that the wholesale price is not regulated and is a function of commercial agreement between companies.
The other challenge is that the telecommunications operators duplicate infrastructure to carry internet from the boarders and distribute it via the mobile or fixed line networks. They recover the costs by charging the consumers.
This is why the Government of Zimbabwe has implemented an infrastructure sharing policy which eliminates duplication and therefore reduce costs. In addition some of the operations costs for the internet providers and mobile networks are high due to inefficiencies and sub-standard business management strategies. There are only a few licensed ISPs and telecommunications companies in the country. The Government therefore puts policy and regulatory framework to ensure the licensed companies don’t overcharge consumers. Unfortunately, the price of data is not regulated yet due to the complexity of broadband services.
The Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is a switching platform where internet carriers exchange traffic with each other which enables multiple interconnection. This reduces transit costs associated with direct peering.
The limited number of IXPs in Africa means that sometimes when you want to connect to a website or internet point next door you may end up going out to Europe or somewhere overseas and only to come back. This increases transit costs.
Due to the huge size of the internet, companies like Google provide a platforms that enable users to search and retrieve content on the internet. In addition, google provides servers to store the content.
The internet has now evolved to a point where the users are no longer just people but interconnected things such as machines, fridges, cars, etc.
This is where the terminology “Internet of Things” comes from.
One wonders how the internet will look like in 2050.
Dr Dennis Magaya is the Chief Consultant and Director of the Rubiem Group, which is a leading ICT consultancy firm with operations in 9 African countries.
