Summary

  • A TFanus account says Eritrean email was batched and compressed for UUCP calls to California, with prices declining from about US$25 to US$12–17 per megabyte.
  • By 2000, that provider estimated 1,200–1,700 email users across TFanus and Ewan, while a US$2,000 monthly offer for 128K ISP bandwidth put international IP access on a different wholesale footing.

The first Eritrean email service did not need a continuous Internet circuit. In an account dated October 2000, Tewelde Stephanos of TFanus Enterprises said the earliest email effort began at the University of Asmara in 1996, with physics professor Robert Van Buskirk and California-based Craig Harmer working through Eritrea Technical Exchange. Their system used UUCP dial-up: messages were gathered and compressed, then exchanged between servers in Eritrea and California. Stephanos said the method was chosen to reduce the high cost of international telephone calls.

The source describes a specific store-and-forward operating model, not full Internet access.

The service also became a retail product. Stephanos said TFanus and Ewan Technology Solutions had both provided email to the Eritrean market since 1996; the Department of Energy ran a similar service for its personnel. He estimated the two companies together served between 1,200 and 1,700 email users. The range is useful evidence of a market, but it remains an estimate by one provider. It does not define whether a “user” meant an individual, account or organization, and it does not measure how frequently people connected.

Pricing gives a clearer view of what the service sold. The TFanus account said email started at roughly US$25 per megabyte and stood at about US$12–17 per megabyte by October 2000. That is a reported decline in a metered service rate, not a fall in every customer’s total bill. The source does not give message volumes, exchange frequency, provider costs or margins. Still, the unit charge and call-batching mechanism fit together: compressing several messages into one scheduled dial-up session could spread the cost of an international call across more traffic.

That explanation follows the operator’s account; the precise saving per customer is not documented.

The same report described a different economics for Internet service. The Ministry of Transport and Communications had issued four ISP licences, Stephanos wrote: to the two established email firms, to private company Computer Technology Services, and to the state-owned Telecommunications Services of Eritrea (TSE). He said TSE alone could supply international IP connectivity and that ISPs would pay TSE US$2,000 per month for 128K bandwidth. This is an account of a wholesale arrangement, not a residential subscription price.

A metered email tariff and a fixed ISP charge also measure different things; the sources do not support a direct price comparison.

That wholesale design created a control question as well as a cost question. TSE would own the international gateway while also entering the ISP market. Stephanos noted concern about the overlap and said the Ministry expected TSE to separate its public-telecom and ISP businesses, subject to independent audits. Those were described as regulatory expectations, not completed safeguards. The fixed monthly offer could give licensed providers a route to build services, but the sole international IP supplier would still shape capacity and terms.

The 2000 account does not show how the separation worked in practice or whether the quoted 128K offer was taken up.

The opening date is not consistent across the contemporary accounts. An ITU article by Tim Kelly said Eritrea joined the Internet in March 2000, when TSE established a satellite gateway for roughly 300 dial-up subscribers; it reported 29 kbit/s then available. Yet Stephanos’s October account said the country still lacked “full Internet connectivity” and expected gateway equipment and wireless ISP links to be operational by year-end. The two descriptions may refer to different milestones, but that reconciliation is only a possibility.

They should remain separate in the record: one source dates international gateway connectivity, while the provider account describes a later wholesale and ISP rollout still under way.

The story is therefore not simply that email preceded the Internet. Eritrea’s early service turned international connectivity into a metered, compressed exchange that could operate without an always-on IP link. The later ISP offer moved the commercial boundary toward a fixed wholesale fee and centralized international access through TSE. The record captures a shift in the unit of access—from email by megabyte to licensed capacity by the month—without showing that one immediately replaced the other or that either reached most households.

AFRIK-IT networking update (March 1996); Tewelde Stephanos, “Internet in Eritrea” (October 2000); ITU, “Africa joins the Internet Age” (May 2000); ITU News 5/2000 PDF