- African Internet users pay on average 90 times what US surfers pay - US$20 (RM76) for 1 gigabyte of data per month for US surfers but African users have to pay US$1800 (RM6840) for the same amount of data.
Why the costs of data and voice communications in Africa is the highest in the world?
- The infrastructure-strapped continent spends millions of dollars every year to route data and voice traffic from one African country to another through Europe or North American.
Only 1.5% of the 906 million of Africa's population are connected to Internet as compared to 70% of people in Hong Kong and 40% of Malaysian are online.
This is what we called "Digital Divide" - The gap between those who have and those who do not have the ability to access eclectronic technology in general and the Internet and E-Commerce in particular. This will also be causing unbalanced growth and crippling the efforts by the world's poorest continent to become competitive in a global economy driven by communications.
3 comments:
It is lucky for Malaysian to have access to the world wide web at such cheap rate. Since the major ISP in Malaysia like tmnet is offering their internet service at an hourly basis. So, no matter how many bytes of download or information we download from the internet in an hour, the rate is fixed.
For third-world nations in Africa to have a developed telecomunication infrastructure is still a long way to go. This scenario not only happen in Africa, Russia is another country in which their internet rate is charged on "per bytes of downloads"(which means the more bytes of downloads, the highers the fees). Downloading of songs or multimedia contents in such countries are costly.
Suggestions to solve this problem? Hmm...
I personally feel that it is unfair for the Africans especially when they are consider a third world country. Most of the original Africans are already living in poverty and yet, they are so many difficulties and discriminations befall them.
I will say that this is due to the fact that the Africans are continuously left aside and not taken care of. Without proper education and lack of facilities to push them to get used to the advancement of technology, they will not be able to increase their standard of living and hence, being backward which means only a handful are connected to the internet.
I personally feel that it is unfair for the Africans especially when they are consider a third world country. Most of the original Africans are already living in poverty and yet, they are so many difficulties and discriminations befall them.
I will say that this is due to the fact that the Africans are continuously left aside and not taken care of. Without proper education and lack of facilities to push them to get used to the advancement of technology, they will not be able to increase their standard of living and hence, being backward which means only a handful are connected to the internet. With access to the internet, one can be well inform and expose to the latest updates worldwide.
If the people there are properly educated, they can fight for their rights to have everything equal and no longer be discriminated in all aspect especially in the price of goods. Poor people should be entitled to more reasonable price not, the other way round. I also feel that maybe due to its low demand and geographical area, it is costly to establish lines, ports and facilities to provide internet access to the Africans. For this reason, the Africans must first be given the opportunity to develop its country to an extent where all these technological advancements are made possible.
Malaysia=cheap rate???
calculate:
1Mb=RM77 or RM88
1Gb=1000Mb
1Gb=1000MbxRM77
=RM77000
Africa 1Gb=RM6840
Malaysia 1Gb=RM77000
Malaysia cheap???
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