Summary

  • A 15 November 1996 email described two FidoNet networks, a public X.25 data service, commercial online access and a satellite link still seeking funds.
  • Later accounts used different thresholds: one GAMTEL report dates online service to 1994–95, while a 2003 joint ISP presentation and a government inquiry place full Internet or the national gateway in 1998.
  • The records show overlapping stages, not one uncontested launch date. The proposed 64-kbps link at the Medical Research Council was not reported as built.

A network plan with a funding gap

The most revealing sentence in a 1996 account of Gambian networking is not about a connection that went live. It is about one that could not yet be paid for. Osay Osman Yuuni, writing from the Medical Research Council Laboratories on 15 November, said the institution planned a 64-kbps satellite link to the Internet but was having difficulty finding funds. In the same message, the country’s network map was already more complicated than a single “arrival” date suggests.

Yuuni counted two FidoNet networks. Healthnet served health practitioners and also carried traffic for nongovernmental and educational institutions. Geisnet was a government network for environmental issues, established with help from the United Nations Development Programme. These were useful channels with defined communities; the message does not call them a nationwide public Internet.

A separate service sat beneath the national telephone company, GAMTEL. It ran GAMNET, described as a public data network using X.25 at 9,600 bits per second. GAMTEL had recently taken a CompuServe franchise that could offer online services, including web access. That was a different route from the satellite connection the Medical Research Council still hoped to finance. Nor did the sender’s proposed IP network—fibre along the country, routers in several towns and public kiosks—amount to an operating network: funding was being sought.

Why the date changes with the definition

GAMTEL’s national report prepared for an ITU meeting in 2001 later said Internet service was first introduced in 1994–95 through CompuServe and Delphi, continuing until 1998, when The Gambia obtained its own backbone. A joint presentation by Gambian Internet service providers at an ITU seminar in 2003 drew a sharper distinction: “full high speed Internet” came in late 1998, after GAMNET’s 9.6-kbit service and other older systems. It described a satellite gateway from GAMTEL’s Abuko station to Canada and a gateway opened to private users and businesses that year.

A later government Commission of Inquiry also used 1998 as the start of Internet in The Gambia.

Those accounts need not erase the 1996 evidence. They use “Internet” at different layers: online service through a commercial franchise, a public X.25 network, and a national IP gateway with broader access. The earlier email is a contemporaneous institutional snapshot, not a census; the later dates are retrospective. Together they make a single birthday too neat. In 1996, Gambians already had networked services, but the record still shows the national satellite route as a proposal without funding.

Sources