Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, is currently writing a book on fibre optic cables and digital connectivity. She spent time in late 2023 aboard the ship whose crew is responsible for maintaining most of Africa’s undersea network. She spoke to The Conversation Africa about the importance of these cables.

1. What’s the geographical extent of Africa’s current undersea network?

Fibre optic cables now literally encircle Africa, though some parts of the continent are far better connected than others. This is because both public and private organisations have made major investments in the past ten years.

Based on an interactive map of fibre optic cables, it’s clear that South Africa is in a relatively good position. When the breakages happened, the network was affected for a few hours before the internet traffic was rerouted; a technical process that depends both on there being alternative routes available and corporate agreements in place to enable the rerouting. It’s the same as driving using a tool like Google Maps. If there’s an accident on the road it finds another way to get you to your destination.

But, in several African countries – including Sierra Leone and Liberia – most of the cables don’t have spurs (the equivalent of off-ramps on the road), so only one fibre optic cable actually comes into the country. Internet traffic from these countries basically stops when the cable breaks.

Naturally that has huge implications for every aspect of life, business and even politics. Whilst some communication can be rerouted via satellites, satellite traffic accounts for only about 1% of digital transmissions globally. Even with interventions such as satellite-internet distribution service Starlink it’s still much slower and much more expensive than the connection provided by undersea cables.

Basically all internet for regular people relies on fibre optic cables. Even landlocked countries rely on the network, because they have agreements with countries with landing stations – highly-secured buildings close to the ocean where the cable comes up from underground and is plugged into terrestrial systems. For example southern Africa’s internet comes largely through connections in Melkbosstrand, just outside Cape Town, and Mtunzini in northern KwaZulu-Natal, both in South Africa. Then it’s routed overland to various neighbours.

Each fibre optic cable is extremely expensive to build and to maintain. Depending on the technical specifications (cables can have more or fewer fibre threads and enable different speeds for digital traffic) there are complex legal agreements in place for who is responsible for which aspects of maintenance.

2. What prompted you to write a book about the social history of fibre optic cables in Africa?

I first visited Angola in 2011 to start work for my PhD project. The internet was all but non-existent – sending an email took several minutes at the time. Then I went back in 2013, after the South Atlantic Cable System went into operation. It made an incredible difference: suddenly Angola’s digital ecosystem was up and running and everybody was online.

At the time I was working on social mobility and how people in Angola were improving their lives after a long war. Unsurprisingly, having digital access made all sorts of things possible that simply weren’t imaginable before. I picked up my interest again once I was professionally established, and am now writing it up as a book, Capricious Connections. The title refers to the fact that the cables wouldn’t do anything if it wasn’t for the infrastructure that they plug into at various points.

Landing centres such as Sangano in Angola are fascinating both because of what they do technically (connecting and routing internet traffic all over the country) and because they often highlight the complexities of the digital divide.

For example, Sangano is a remarkable high-tech facility run by an incredibly competent and socially engaged company, Angola Cables. Yet the school a few hundred metres from the landing station still doesn’t have electricity.

When we think about the digital divide in Africa, that’s often still the reality: you can bring internet everywhere but if there’s no infrastructure, skills or frameworks to make it accessible, it can remain something abstract even for those who live right beside it.

In terms of history, fibre optic cables follow all sorts of fascinating global precedents. The 2012 cable that connected one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other is laid almost exactly over the route of the transatlantic slave trade, for example. Much of the basic cable map is layered over the routes of the copper telegraph network that was essential for the British empire in the 1800s.

Most of Africa’s cables are maintained at sea by the remarkable crew of the ship Léon Thévenin. I joined them in late 2023 during a repair operation off the coast of Ghana. These are uniquely skilled artisans and technicians who retrieve and repair cables, sometimes from depths of multiple kilometres under the ocean.

When I spent time with the crew last year, they recounted once accidentally retrieving a section of Victorian-era cable when they were trying to “catch” a much more recent fibre optic line. (Cables are retrieved in many ways; one way is with a grapnel-like hook that is dragged along the ocean bed in roughly the right location until it snags the cable.)

There are some very interesting questions emerging now about what is commonly called digital colonialism. In an environment where data is often referred to with terms like “the new oil”, we’re seeing an important change in digital infrastructure.

Previously cables were usually financed by a combination of public and private sector partnerships, but now big private companies such as Alphabet, Meta and Huawei are increasingly financing cable infrastructure. That has serious implications for control and monitoring of digital infrastructure.

Given we all depend so much on digital tools, poorer countries often have little choice but to accept the terms and conditions of wealthy corporate entities. That’s potentially incredibly dangerous for African digital sovereignty, and is something we should be seeing a lot more public conversation about.

• Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah is an Associate Professor, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
• This article first appeared in The Conversation

OpenAI, the company behind the wildly successful ChatGPT large language model (LLM), has announced DALL-E 3, a much-improved text-to-image AI generator that’s supposedly safer, smarter, and can leverage ChatGPT to create prompts on the fly.

DALL-E 2 is still one of the more sophisticated generative AI platforms out there, and even then, it gets things wrong – ignoring specific prompts or just making things look plain weird. OpenAI reckons those issues will be far less prominent, with DALL-E 3 being more understanding of situational context.

Aside from understanding user prompts better, DALL-E 3’s coolest addition is probably its ability to pair up with ChatGPT. Rather than waste valuable time thinking up a semi-legible prompt, just have ChatGPT do it for you. You’ll still need to think up the general idea, but ChatGPT will turn that idea into a longer-form paragraph, giving DALL-E more to work with, thus creating better results.

You won’t be able to fiddle with DALL-E 3 just yet. Only ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise users will get the chance to poke around DALL-E’s innards in October, with a later release planned for research labs and the OpenAI’s API service sometime before Spring’s end. OpenAI is being rather coy about a public rollout and didn’t commit to a release window.

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Even Uber Eats is jumping on the AI bandwagon

Uber Eats has confirmed that it’s bringing AI into its food-delivery app because of course it is. This is 2023, after all. It’s called a bandwagon for a reason. Uber’s gone down the ‘AI assistant’ route here, though South Africans might have to wait their turn before getting to experiment with the artificial intelligence, with the feature first hitting the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK.

The AI assistant, which is powered by Google’s PaLM 2 LLM, is about as safe as an AI model can get. It’s got about as much functionality as Samsung’s Bixby did back in 2019, with the whole idea being to ask the chatbot for help finding restaurants or specific food items nearby while taking other contexts into consideration.

Want curry for under R100, and to be delivered in under 30 minutes? Uber’s assistant will try its best to help you out, answering in a somewhat human-like way to feign sophistication. Uber reckons that discussing your potential food order with a machine will cut down on scrolling through the app aimlessly in search of what to eat for lunch that day. It’s possible we’re being slightly too cynical, not having tested the AI assistant for ourselves. But unlikely. If TechCrunch’s demo is anything to go by, it looks like we are right.

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Internet is restored!

Léon Thévenin, the cable-laying ship responsible for repairing three broken subsea cables, has finally completed work on the Sat-3 cable, after previously repairing the Ace and Wacs cables earlier this month, according to Telkom subsidiary, Openserve (via TechCentral).

“Openserve is pleased that the restoration on the Sat-3 undersea cable, which experienced a break recently, has been completed. The completion of this work is good news for internet users as this means that there is more available capacity and improved network resiliency,” the company said.

It’s not yet confirmed what caused the three undersea cables to fall into disrepair, though many believe that a rockfall off the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo was responsible for the damages. Whatever the case, with the repairs complete, South Africa should no longer be suffering poor internet speeds and connections. If you’re still having issues… you might want to take that up with your ISP.

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You’ve got a Pal in me, Instax

Here at Stuff, we’re fans of Instax. The company’s Mini 12 film camera was the most recent product to capture our hearts (and ugly mugs). Now, the company is moving towards a more kid-friendly line-up, with the Instax Pal being the first to enter your child’s sticky hands once it launches in October for $200.

The Pal is tiny. Like, really tiny. So tiny that it’ll fit into the palm of your hand and doesn’t feature a built-in viewfinder or any sort of printing functionality. That’s a job for the included Instax Mini Link 2 printer, which talks to the Pal through a companion app. For a device that’s supposedly geared toward kids, Instax is making the process rather more complicated than it needs to be.

It starts to make a little more sense once you get a look at what a ten-pack of Instax film costs. The digital printer’s inclusion allows for more trial and error, meaning kids won’t be burning through a ten-pack every couple of minutes. The Mini Link 2 also allows for filters, stickers, and custom-shutter sounds – all features in other words that’ll be most appreciated by someone on the younger side.

Even so, $200 is a lot of money. Local pricing and availability for the Pal is yet to be confirmed, though we’re bracing ourselves for a R4,000+ price point, accounting for the Mini Link 2’s R2,000 price.

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