Saturday, February 1, 2014

The Price of Communication (2 of 5)

In an age where telecommunications has been taken for granted throughout the majority of the world for at least a decade, North Kivu struggles to maintain basic contact with the outside world and according to a few benchmarks of communication, North Kivu is regressing. 

In 1930, Butembo, North Kivu opened it’s first and only post office. Today a dilapidated building with hundreds of unused mailboxes remains. With unreliable dirt roads that are prone to rebel attacks connecting major cities, international mail handlers DHL Express and Express Mail Service (EMS) must use expensive air transport for their limited operations. According to the EMS office in Butembo, the minimum shipping rate for a package weighing up to 1.1 pounds being sent from Butembo to the Goma is $62- a price that limits it’s operations to only two packages being sent out of the EMS office per week to Goma. Instead, the merchants of Butembo use a decentralized network of baggage handlers utilizing large cargo trucks and cell phones.


Development of the DRC's internet and broadband market has been held back by the poorly developed national and international infrastructure. Exasperating the scarcity of communication, the three telecommunication providers Airtel, Vodacom and Orange routinely experience outages lasting for days, and because the DRC doesn’t have a fiber optic cable, internet must pass through these sluggish and expensive telecommunication providers. Only one hotel and two or three internet cafes in the entire city of Butembo, population roughly eight hundred thousand, have internet capabilities that allow a user to stream a low resolution video with frequent re-buffering. 

Estimated market penetration rates in the DRC’s telecoms sector – end 2013
Market
Penetration rate
Mobile
35%
Fixed
0.1%
Internet
2.3%
(Source: BuddeComm based on various sources)

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