Satellite broadband providers mostly fall into two categories: firms (such as Iridium) with satellites in geostationary orbit (thus service is expensive and slow), or new entrants (like OneWeb and SpaceX) promising thousands of satellites in low earth orbit (with service that is cheaper and fast — but doesn’t exist yet).

One firm, however, has already already implemented satellite broadband using a small and growing network of medium earth orbit satellites. O3b Networks (now part of SES) currently maintains 12 satellites at altitude of 8,000 km, which is about 1/4 the distance of geosynchronous competitors. This month O3b Networks plans to launch four more satellites from French Guiana aboard a Soyuz rocket from Arianespace. An additional four satellites are scheduled to be launched in 2019.

The network provides backhaul services to mobile providers as mobile 4G subscribers grow from 1.6 to 3.8 billion by 2020. The network also serves multiple niche markets such as emergency response and cruise ships.

The name “O3b” derives from “other three billion” — in reference to those on the planet currently without broadband.

Total broadband coverage of the planet will precede total broadband adoption by a number of years. Prices will need to drop and technologies will need to simplify before everyone is connected.

But total broadband coverage is still extremely significant, because there will always be first adopters that bring considerable benefits to a community even before most people can afford access themselves.

As I travel through developing countries, I see a lot of different categories of first adopters, even in the most resource-poor settings:

• Aid workers: foreign aid workers invariably maintain internet access, generally through cellular connections that are too expensive for most in the community;
• Health clinics: even remote clinics can often afford to pay higher costs associate with cell or microwave access;
• Missionaries: In many regions, the first to arrive with smartphones are missionaries;
• Peace Corps Volunteers: Over sixty countries host Peace Corps volunteers, many in extremely remote regions;
• Tourists: Even remote eco-lodges these days figure out how to provide wifi to guests;
• (And my favorite) Surfers: With their maniacal obsession for finding the next great wave, combined with their need to stay in touch, surfers support the arrival of wifi to even the most distant surf camps.

The internet relies almost completely on fiber optic cable for long distance transmission (the other alternative is satellite — which represents only about 1% of overseas traffic).

In the case of Africa, the first fiber optic connection to the continent technically arrived in 2000 with the SEA-ME-WE3 cable which stretches from Germany, through the Red Sea, to India, Southeast Asia, and Australia. It only connected to Egypt and Djibouti in Africa, however.

Meaningful connections to Africa didn’t appear for another decade with first-time linkages to many countries. Since then, every year has seen logarithmic growth in capacity — continuing into 2018. For example, current capacity to all of the countries of East Africa is approximately 24 terabits per second (Tbs) over multiple cables, a figure in 2018 expected to grow to nearly 90 Tbs due to the completion of a major new cable (DARE). West Africa capacity is approximately 45 terabits per second — a figure in 2018 expected to grow to nearly 200 terabits per second due to the completion of three new major cables (SAIL, SACS, EllaLink).

New cables not only introduce capacity, they also introduce redundancy. Undersea cables are periodically damaged unintentionally, such as the outage in Somalia last year due to a commercial shipping incident. With a new “web” of connections, outages will be less prolonged and severe.

Simultaneously, hundreds of projects are laying cable across the continent itself.

Liquid Telecom, operator of the largest fiber network across Africa, has laid over 50,000 km of cable. Other international companies are also involved. For example, in 2017 Google laid about 1000 km of fiber in Uganda, and is currently laying 1000 km more in Ghana. Facebook plans nearly 1000 km of fiber itself in Uganda.

With added capacity comes added competition — and lower prices. Nic Rudnick, the chief executive of Liquid Telecom, estimates that the price of moving a megabit of data from London to Lagos has dropped over several years from $600 to $2.

Fiber optic cable represents only part of the broadband solution in Africa — it will likely never reach most rural areas, for example. But in terms of providing a capable, expanding backbone to broadband services across the continent, fiber optic infrastructure is growing quickly.