What happens to landlocked countries?
There must be affordable prices. We don’t want the landing station countries to become rent collectors. If we can achieve open access, we might raise our investment. – Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation’s CEO, Tesfaye Bir and member of the EASSY Consortium So-called monopoly country providers (or countries which control access to international bandwidth) post a particular problem for landlocked countries. They either have to accept the price offered by the national monopoly provider of international bandwidth or use satellite. For example, a country like Lesotho has a fibre link to South Africa’s Telkom, and through it a connection to a SAT3 landing station. But the prices offered by Telkom mean that it is cheaper to use satellite than to make use of what should be the cheaper fibre route. Landlocked countries are vulnerable, as this second example illustrates: A country in Southern Africa approached one of the SAT3 Consortium’s international members who expressed a willingness t
