NAIROBI (IPS)�African Internet users are being forced by western companies to pay the full cost of connecting to the World Wide Web, while European and American users pay nothing. This is one of the main hurdles blamed for the slow spread of the Internet on the world�s poorest continent.

"This is exploitation. These networks are raping Africa of half a billion dollars a year," said Richard Bell, chairperson of Kenya�s Internet Service Providers (ISP) Association.

When an ISP in Africa wants to connect to the Internet, they have to purchase a link from Kenya to America to connect to the network over there. When a Kenyan customer sends an e-mail to a recipient in America, the e-mail travels by satellite to America and gets delivered to the recipient.

The largest cost of getting that e-mail from its origination to its destination is the cost of the satellite link from Kenya to America. The ISP in Kenya pays for that link.

Conversely, when a subscriber of America On-Line sends an e-mail to a recipient in Kenya, the e-mail will again travel to Kenya over the Kenyan ISP�s satellite link, for which Kenyan subscribers bear the cost.

Thus, the American subscribers send and receive e-mail for free, whereas Kenyans have to pay for both.

International capacity in and out of Africa is estimated at about gigabyte of traffic, at a cost of $10,000 per month per megabyte. These links are currently costing Africa more than $120 million a year.

"However, if Africa was utilizing the bandwidth it really requires, and which it would utilize if the cost of that bandwidth wasn�t so high, the latent requirement for bandwidth is easily ten times the existing bandwidth," said Mr. Bell.

"In other words, the cost to Africa would be over a billion dollars a year, of which 50 percent should be borne by the European and North American networks, not by the African networks," he said.

Asia suffered the same problem until a few years ago. But because of the size of their economies, they had sufficient volumes of traffic to be able to force that reversal for commercial reasons.

"The problem with Africa is that we do not have those volumes of traffic. And a lot of our traffic even within Africa is transiting through Europe and North America to get back to Africa again. So the problem is compounded two-fold," complains Mr. Bell.

This problem should soon be a thing of the past following the launch of the Kenya Internet Exchange Point in April. The aim is to ensure that Kenyan traffic remains Kenyan.

Similar national exchanges are being setup in Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, Nigeria, and Mozambique.

"We are also in the process of setting up the Pan African Virtual Internet Exchange where the intention is to have direct interconnection between countries in Africa. The aim is to regionalize the traffic to reduce the overall costs," explained Mr. Bell.

For example, traffic from Kenya to South Africa, instead of both countries having to pay the full cost of an international circuit to America, each would pay half the cost of a single circuit between Kenya and South Africa.

Mike Jenson, who runs the Africa Interconnectivity Web site, believes this could make a significant difference.

"No one really knows how much intra-African traffic there is, but it�s sure to grow and become significant. If only five percent is intra-regional, it would add up to a sizeable amount," he said.

This could end the "rape" that Mr. Bell complains about.

"If we can get enough traffic in Africa then maybe we can force some of these international backbones to start establishing points of wording from previous ones. It says that Jambonet has the monopoly until 2004 depending on performance.

"And it performs very badly," said Mr. Bell. "Our association has written to the regulator and requested the regulator to commission an independent study of the performance of Jambonet.

"We are confident the independent study will demonstrate what we have been saying for the last two to three years, that the performance is not as good as is required."

When that happens, CCK will be in a position to issue an additional license for a second backbone before 2004.

"Whereas it doesn�t appear at the moment for the consumer that a lot has changed, actually behind the scenes a lot of things have already changed and will continue to change," promises Mr. Bell.

There are an estimated 100,000 subscribers in Kenya and four million across the continent.