Summary

  • InfoMail opened full IP access from Uganda in August 1995 using satellite connectivity, avoiding the digital leased-line route that a contemporary Ugandan network account called expensive and unreliable.
  • The link created a new international gateway; contemporary estimates still place most of InfoMail’s first users in Kampala, where the company’s dial-up point of presence was based.

Uganda was already exchanging electronic mail before InfoMail’s full-IP service. Charles Musisi’s account of MUKLA, Makerere University’s network, traces wider electronic networking to 1991. By January 1995, MUKLA reported more than 300 user sites, most around Kampala; users elsewhere often had to make long-distance calls back to the capital. An Entebbe node followed in February. These systems carried email and store-and-forward traffic, a different experience from interactive IP services and the World Wide Web. (National Research Council, Bridge Builders)

Musisi dates InfoMail’s opening of full IP access, including Web facilities, to August 1995. He describes it as the first full-access site in East Africa and the Horn of Africa; that is his regional characterization, not proof of a continent-wide first. Starcom, another Ugandan provider, became operational in November. The chapter says both companies chose very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite access instead of digital leased lines from the Uganda Posts and Telecommunication Corporation, which Musisi called overpriced and unreliable. The satellite shifted the international route; it did not remove the local telephone network from the customer’s path. (National Research Council, Bridge Builders)

The early footprint was measurable, and narrow. An NSRC update in March 1996 reported an estimated 250 full-IP users at InfoMail, “almost all in the Kampala area.” A December provider profile described a 64-kbit/s private satellite link to the United States and dial-up PPP access of up to 14.4 kbit/s. Those numbers describe different parts of the system: 64 kbit/s was the shared international backhaul; 14.4 kbit/s was the advertised top modem rate for an individual dial-up connection. The same profile listed leased lines as a case-by-case service. The user count and equipment details were company or sector estimates, not an audited census or independent performance test. (NSRC, March 1996; NSRC, InfoMail profile, December 1996)

The alternative was not cheap. A 2002 IICD technical note retrospectively put the Kampala VSAT equipment at more than US$100,000 and the 64-kbit/s service at about US$5,000 a month. Those are later estimates, not a surviving invoice. A field update archived by NSRC in October 1996 says InfoMail told a visitor it had nearly filled its satellite capacity and expected to add more. That report suggests the gateway was already facing a scaling question, but it does not measure utilization or prove what expansion followed. (M. Hegener, IICD, Internet via Satellite in Africa; NSRC, October 1996)

The historical change was therefore specific. Satellite access gave a Ugandan provider another way to carry international traffic and offer interactive Internet service. It did not by itself distribute that service across the country. The local gateway, dial-up lines, access to telephones and later capacity additions still determined who could use it. The record supports an important regional full-IP milestone; it does not show that one satellite link made Uganda broadly connected.