World’s last region gets businesses online

October 29, 2009 2:38pm

In July we reported on how East Africa ended its isolation as the world’s last region not connected to the global broadband network. Until that point, the region relied on “satellite internet links that are slow, unreliable and often prohibitively expensive, problems that have inhibited business activity, public sector efficiency and the spread of internet access.”

Now the investment in that new technology is paying dividends. As Barney Jopson reports, Kenyans are rushing to get their businesses online and adopting “the late 1990s vocabulary of ‘B2B’ (business-to-business) and ‘B2C (business-to-consumer) transactions.”

But the changes aren’t without controversy. Already, a senior official at the ministry of communication “has accused some internet service providers of acting like a ‘cartel’.

Continue reading: “Broadband: Cables set to transform business”