A Review of the Bulk Capacity Marketplace

Welcome to your course on A Review of the Bulk Capacity Marketplace!

This course is designed for African policymakers, regulators, ICT officials and the operators and investors who buy and sell wholesale connectivity. Most connectivity strategies fail not because the retail networks were poorly built, but because the wholesale layer beneath them, the bulk capacity that carries every byte, was treated as someone else's problem and left dependent on a single route abroad. Reading the marketplace flips that around. It follows where the traffic actually goes, where the demand sits, and how capacity is sourced, so that affordable, resilient bandwidth becomes a deliberate policy choice rather than an accident of geography.

The curriculum opens by defining bulk capacity and the three current challenges of infrastructure, affordability and GDP growth, then reads the marketplace findings, from the 82 percent of bandwidth that terminated in Europe in 2018 to the doubling of intra-African traffic and the demand forecast of over 70 Tbps by 2024. You will work through the sourcing strategy of primary and secondary providers for the four regional groups, profile the three key players, Angola Cables, WIOCC and Telecom Egypt, and weigh the options open to landlocked countries. The course closes with a readiness self-check and an applied project on your own country's capacity position.

By mastering these concepts, you will be equipped to read your own market's demand and supply, diversify capacity across providers and routes, strengthen regional and local traffic exchange, and recommend policies that make connectivity affordable and resilient in your own local context.

Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this course, you will be able to:

• Explain what bulk capacity is and why affordable, resilient wholesale connectivity matters for Africa's digital economy.
• Interpret the marketplace findings: where traffic terminates, where demand sits, and how member states compare on infrastructure, affordability and connectivity.
• Apply the sourcing strategy of primary and secondary capacity providers across the four regional groups and the landlocked-country options.
• Recommend policies that foster regional collaboration, infrastructure investment, local traffic exchange and competition among providers in your own context.

Who is this course for?

This course is designed for policymakers, regulators, ICT officials and public sector leaders across Africa, and for the operators and investors who trade capacity. It is highly beneficial for individuals who are:

• Involved in national broadband strategy, wholesale market regulation, or the negotiation of international capacity.
• Planning infrastructure investment, Internet Exchange development, or data centre and cloud initiatives.
• Responsible for making connectivity affordable and widely accessible in their country or region.