This should definitely rock the Internet service market and should have other ISP’s preparing their marketing teams to come up with new products.

This Barely a day after I posted about ISP’s not heating up the competition. I take my words back as Zuku have done just that with the introduction of bandwidth in double digits (Mbps) and a massive price drop.

Zuku who have share holding in TEAMs and available bandwidth from Seacom, have mentioned that they have 50Gb of bandwidth available to sell to the market compared to Access Kenya’s 10Gb, 5Gb from either fiber provider.

I am now surely looking forward to increased bandwidth and increased price drops in the coming months.

The Internet has spread around the Globe like wildfire, and Africa has not been left out. Its now Africa’s turn more than ever to display its true potential, its Africa’s turn to showcase its whizz kids.

The need for local content is growing, with international content not meant for everyone due to drawbacks such as language barriers, differences in social and traditional values, and general usefulness of information, local content will cater for the exact needs of the audience looking for it.

Local content can also bring down Internet costs, by ISP’s providing access to users only to the local loop for local content delivery. This way the users are still informed about their surroundings and are able to keep up with what is happening around them and also communicate with other users online at cheaper costs.

Content does not just happen to come from anywhere, it needs to be created. With so much content coming in from developed countries, to be content providers in developing countries could be discouraged from moving forward with actually providing their content, simply because they would feel who will get to their content within the region.

To reverse the discouragement, these content providers need to be encouraged and ICTvillage.com are doing just that. ICTvillage in partnership with KDN have come up with a local content hub idea, a local digital village. For as little as 3000 shs ($40) a month (subject to terms and conditions) one can setup a digital village and provide access to free LOCAL INTERNET within their building enabling the users to perform the following tasks online for free:

• Send & receive Email
• Read local newspapers
• Visiting websites hosted in Kenya
• Download government content
• Make & receive phone calls (on-net)

This should spearhead a surge in local content development. To make this even more successful, local hosting charges should then also be revised and brought in line with those of developed countries where anyone from anywhere in the world can get hosting for as little as 750shs ($10) a month.

This is the opportunity web developers have been craving for, this is where they can now make their presence count as they target their websites to the intended audiences much easily and much faster, this is where geniuses will emerge and their work recognized online.

From what I have seen ICTvillage.com do have a a slight drawback as home users cannot quite take advantage of the service unless you happen to live in apartments that have been hooked up to the service. The service is open to schools, office buildings, government offices, restaurants, clubs and no mention of residential areas. Please do not forget residential areas make the large number of users for content.

As always your comments are welcomed, lets get a discussion going and see what else we can do to improve on local content.

Meanwhile I am off to get my site locally hosted (provided it not going to blow a hole in my pocket)