Word: accessibility
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...permitted into the former war zone (with the exception of an entourage flying over it with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon), and journalists are allowed into the camps only on government-sponsored tours. The U.N. and other international agencies - "58 of them!" Rajapaksa points out - do have some access to the camps, but they are not permitted to talk to the people inside to monitor their conditions. He insists that restrictions in the camps will be loosened eventually: "This is 11/2 months, my dear. Just give me some more time...
With the arrival of SEACOM, which cost some $600 million, East Africa will no longer be dogged by the rather ignominious distinction of being the last place on Earth without access to a high-speed submarine fiber-optic cable. Until now, it has had to rely on vastly more expensive - and less dependable - satellite connections for Internet and international phone service. (Read: "Kenya's Mobile Gold Mine...
After famine, now comes the flood. SEACOM is the first of three fiber-optic cables that will connect East Africa, via the Kenyan port of Mombasa, to the rest of the world. Analysts say that could lead to a more than 90% reduction in the cost of Internet access in years to come. The high price of using the Internet has up until now crippled the region's nascent tech sector, denying jobs to millions of well-educated young Africans. (Read: "Kenya's Blackboard Jungle...
...challenges. Only 5.9% of Africans are connected to the Internet, and most are in North African countries such as Egypt and Algeria. That compares to 26.9% for the rest of the world. To put those numbers in perspective, consider this: Just 17% of people in sub-Saharan Africa have access to electricity...
...those statistics don't take into account the fact that people will use the Internet over their mobile phones, which are seemingly ubiquitous even in the poorest African villages. Nor does it measure the myriad ways in which people will take advantage of speedy Internet access to create businesses or offer services that, before Thursday, would have been too costly to fund. "The demand for bandwidth can't be based on current prices and current demands," says Stork. "As soon as prices drop, many more applications come up and create more demand...