Du Global au Local: quelles solutions, quels enjeux pour connecter l’Afrique?

We are, in 2006, at a crucial step of the Internet network development: the wide diffusion of the high bandwidth for new multi‑media uses which leads to rebuilding that one can characterize as a digital planning of territories. The problem is the same all around the world: to spread the high bandwidth at a correct cost for the various protagonists from the operator to the end‑user. The solutions to be implemented are the subject of discussions and struggles between various types of actors, private, public, associative, national and international, who are different according to their location at the center or in periphery of the system. Two economic logics are clashing: one which prevailed at the beginnings of the Internet, the co‑operative model where the network would become a world public property, and another which tends to spread today, the pure market logic. The case of Africa where the problems are exacerbated, illustrates what is at stake.