New undersea cable to South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique brings high-speed internet to Eastern Africa

Finally, it's done! This has been a long time coming; I remember writing about the cables under construction back in February. For most websites dialup just doesn't cut it anymore, and high-speed internet is just about the difference between having access and no access at all. Simply playing a video on YouTube for example requires a fairly fast connection that Eastern Africa just didn't have until now.



According to the article, companies such as Tanesco (electricity), TTCL (communications), Tanzania Railways and Universities of Dar es Salaam and Dodoma are already benefiting from the new connection.

A part of the article also mentions that though prices have gone down for businesses from $3000 a month to $600 a month, ISPs are not lowering prices for average consumers but are instead offering increased bandwidth. Whether they can keep this up for long is hard to say, because the idea of lowering prices to average consumers as well may just be too tempting to one and this would cause the others to follow suit. We'll see what happens in the next few weeks/months.

The comments below the article are particularly interesting so be sure to take a look at them. Many have already begun to see an improvement in service, but certainly not all.

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Number of Spanish teachers in Spain increases a bit

Here's an article from today on the growth of interest in Spanish in Kenya:

He said ten years ago there was no Spanish teacher in Kenya but today there are more than 25 from Spain.

He added: "Twenty five years ago, documents in the United States of America were only in English, now they use English and Spanish alongside other languages."

He said there were plans to build a Spanish cultural centre similar to the French Alliance Française. "Spanish is the world’s fourth most spoken language, and the second language of international communication. 400 million people in around 20 countries speak Spanish," he said.

Good news, but I find the first claim a bit hard to believe though: was there really not a single Spanish teacher from Spain in Kenya only ten years ago?

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