The number of Internet
users in Senegal has increase by 150% between 2000 and 2001, which
places the country in a leading position with Togo, one of the African countries with the highest
level of use.In 2000, the bandwidth for
Paris, Canada, and the United States were respectively 42 Mbites,
2 Mbites, and 48 KBites.In April 2002, Senegal counted 12,000 Internet subscribers, but roughly
100,000 Senegalese were active users and regularly connect in the 150 access
points such as cyber-cafés, phone centers etc.More than 200 websites (.sn) have been
created.
We count 15 ISPs in
Senegal, Sonatel Multimedia (subsidiary of Sonatel parent company) who has the highest market share in
the market followed by,Sentel (second in terms of market share, and revenues), and
Metissacana among other.
In under-developed
countries, cyber-cafes are the main means for connecting to the Internet, and Senegal is no exception.It avoids the hassle of buying a computer, finding a provider, wait for
a long time before somebody is sent, and of course the expensive monthly
charges. A report entitled The
Information Age presents the 2003 world indicators for all the countries in
the world.
The information provided are
as follows: daily newspaper, radios, television,
personal computers, internet, and ICTs expenditures.The following table gives a
overview of the computer and Internet diffusion in a few African
countries.It is interesting to notice
that despite its 200 million inhabitants (estimate), Nigeria’s total number of
Internet users (115,000 users) is barely superior to that of Senegal (100,000
users), which has a population of approximately 10 million inhabitants.
Note: Source 2003.
Conversion $1= CFA 655.74
There are a total of, roughly,
1.5 million Internet users in Africa.South Africa counts for 1 million of this number, or in other
words accounts for 66.6%.UNPD has
estimated that in sub-Saharan Africa, less than 0.1% of the population has access to the
network.
