Berkman Center Events & Webcasts

Ethan liveblogged Calestous Juma’s Berkman Center Talk (Video can be found here):

Professor Juma had the opportunity to see the launch of the SEACOM cable in Tanzania. “I took the trouble to go down into the manhole to actually see the cable. It’s a very modest thing.” Indeed – the actual cable is slimmer than your forearm, a very expensive and very fragile thing. He walks us through some of the existing and proposed cables, mentioning that SAT-3, the West African cable, has less than 5% utilization I plan to follow up and make sure I understood that figure correctly. He nods to the London – Lagos cable intended to suplement SAT-3, and new cables, like the Mauritius/Madagascar LION cable.

via …My heart’s in Accra » Calestous Juma and the future of African communications.

Be sure to also check out Ethan and Eric Osiakwan’s talk at Berkman last fall on Africa’s Internet Infrastructure and The Climate of Innovation Around Information Technology in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Plus, Professor Juma also had a piece that ran today at the BBC on “Riding the Digital Express“, following up on many of the issues he addressed yesterday:

Africa could benefit from this new infrastructure if it can focus on four critical areas: lowering the cost of access to bandwidth; expanding training opportunities in multimedia technology; stimulating enterprise development and liberalizing the market for devices to access the net.