Companies reaching the unreached population with fast Internet

Imagine three ponds. The first is barely able to contain the large fish that swim in its waters.

There is a little bit more space for manoeuvring in the second pond, filled as it is with medium size fish. A group of fishermen have cornered both ponds. They are territorial.

The third pond is the largest and it is teeming with millions of small fish. But fishermen are yet to figure out how to catch these fish.

These ponds, Dirk-Jan Koeman says, are the Internet market in Africa. He works for Poa! Internet, one of a growing number of companies that are trying out different tools and techniques to connect that last, elusive bit of the population to fast Internet.

“You can’t use a fishing rod here. It won’t work. You have to come with a net or something else,” he says.

At the risk of mixing metaphors, companies like Poa! Internet are at the forefront of trying to bridge the digital divide. Over the last few months, Poa! Internet has been working to deliver affordable Internet to the residents of Kibera.

There is a general perception of the people living on the other side of the digital divide. They are locked out of the digital web. They are likely to live in far-flung corners of Kenya. They are the 14.7 per cent of Kenyans who are untouched by the Internet.

But in Kibera, this perception is revealed as a distortion. In Kibera, there is more of a continuum, less of a divide. On this side of the continuum is Mr Samuel Otieno, running a second-hand fashion business wedged between a pub and a Seventh Day Adventist church.

“I like being online, on Facebook with my friends. I used to advertise my business on OLX but I could no longer afford the data bundles to keep seeing who wanted to buy clothes,” said Mr Otieno.

He is forced to ration Internet access as he does luxury goods, subsisting on 10, maybe 20, megabytes of data per day. His Internet is a different world than that of a fibre user in Kileleshwa or a budding ‘artiste’ sipping coffee and drinking free WiFi in an uptown café.

Mr Otieno’s internet is necessarily slow, his videos, when he allows himself that luxury, take longer to buffer.

Blame his phone. Blame his non-4G SIM Card. Blame the hole in the web of connectivity above his house.

He’s been using Poa! Internet for the last two months: “ever since they got here”. But he’s yet to gather himself up for another round of advertising on OLX.

Poa! Internet’s choice tool to reach people like Mr Otieno is WiFi. The company has set up 56 access points around Kibera that each blanket about a 100 meter radius with Internet.

Data bundles on Poa! Internet do not expire for a year. They are cheap relative to the rest of the market – for those that can afford it, a 20 GB bundle goes for Sh3,000.

In a telephone interview, the company’s CEO tells me why WiFi is a no-brainer for reaching the un-connected.

“These technologies that we’re using cost a lot less than existing technologies,” says Mr Andy Halsall.

He ought to know. His CV includes experience with FON, a decade-old Spanish-born company which claims, in rather superlative terms, that it will blanket the globe with WiFi.

Across Nairobi in another neighborhood, Able Wireless is providing homes with WiFi for as little as Sh500 per month— fast enough to stream and a one year warranty guarantee for the equipment, the company’s website claims.

The people that dreamt up Ushahidi have now given us BRCK. The device is a modem and WiFi router in one. With about eight hours of battery life, a BRCK can go from the upscale office to rugged rural Kenya.

Appropriately, marketing content for the device is characterized by images of the ‘wild’ with a well-worn looking BRCK in the foreground.

“The modems we’re using right now are built for a different context where you have ubiquitous Internet, ubiquitous electricity. Yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury,” said Juliana Rotich, an executive director at BRCK, in a TED Talk on the device.

The bigger fishermen in this pond include the American-based Internet giants, perhaps in search of that one indicator that may soon be elusive in the web-saturated West— customer growth.

In 2014, Microsoft launched its 4Afrika initiative. Couched in developmental lingo, one of its projects was to provide cheap Internet to rural areas, in this case Nanyuki.

However, Microsoft’s tools are slightly different from those used by Poa! Internet. The company is taking advantage of television white spaces— a fancy technical term that simply refers to the unused bits of spectrum allocated to broadcasters— to project WiFi signals.

“White space technology has the potential to spur innovation in this space and to provide Internet to otherwise unreachable areas,” said Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture lecturer, Mr Ephraim Mureu.

Google is trying out similar experiments across the continent. More fancifully, the company’s Project Loon plans to use balloons guided by stratospheric wind to cut on infrastructure costs in delivering Internet across the world.

But all these solutions are not without their problems. Project Loon has an obvious one— balloons get blown away, they pop. In addition, countries also generally like to be able to control stuff flying within their airspace.

In Kibera, Mr Halsall admits that the density of buildings and the materials of choice— varying versions of metal—“do weird things to the digital signal”. This is something that his company is working to remedy.

No matter how big, global Internet giants still need to confront government officials. In Kenya, a wrench has been thrown on the path of all companies that wish to use white spaces to deliver Internet.

A regulatory scheme has been introduced that will require these companies to deal with broadcast signal distributors, who have been granted trial licenses to operate white spaces.

And then there is the question of how much Internet is enough. Increasingly, arguments about Internet Access have been couched in human rights rhetoric. This is particularly the case for Facebook.

Using this argument, the company has used its Internet.Org project to provide specific, limited content for Internet users.

An ethical question arises: is it better for these people to have no Internet at all or for them to think that Wikipedia and Facebook are the sum of what the web has to offer?

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