A couple months ago, I wrote about the Central African Backbone which was in the process of being planned. More news has come along on this front and it runs a bit counter to what seemed to be the plan in my previous article. The good news in all of this is that, according to this article, the World Bank has indeed fully committed to the development loan:
The Board of the World Bank has approved total project funding of US$215 million, of which US$26.2 million will go towards the first phase of developing each country’s national backbones to give them access to the international landing station in Cameroon.
The only thing is that instead of the line running from Algeria to the south, apparently the line is going to run from the Cameroonian coast, inland to the east, in order to connect Chad and CAR. The goal being to obviously favor countries starting with the letter C as C stands for 'connectivity' or something like which I've just made up... The genius of this plan is that they expect to run the cable along an oil pipeline that terminates at the coastal town of Kribi in Cameroon. Sounds good to me if it means that people will get proper terrestrial connections in the very near future.
This recent article makes a brief mention of redundant connections, which may be where the connection up through Algeria comes in to play at some later date. The ambiguity goes a long way to explain why the CAB hasn't made as much news as it should because in reality, the coastal cables are incredibly easy in comparison to connecting up those who are further inland. Hopefully we'll get more coverage as the deployment proceeds and solidifies.
