LOST IN TRANSMISSION

Aug 17 , 2025.

With connections collapsing at peak hours and “unlimited” packages proving anything but, digital workers struggle to convince global clients they can deliver. Software developers are painfully familiar with the patchy internet. Some days, the connection plunges to 98Kb/s, marooning them on a frozen screen and dragging 45-day projects to 60. Monthly data bills of roughly 3,000 Br, close to half the average of public service salary, barely buy enough bandwidth to open a modest file, let alone keep Zoom alive.

Such stories jar with the authorities' grand digital ambitions. The domestic business-process outsourcing (BPO) is touted as one of Africa’s fastest-growing sectors, forecast by Statista to pull in 490 million dollars next year and 845 million dollars by 2030, up from about 50 million dollars last year. Employment has ballooned from 3,300 workers four years ago to 25,000, yet clients are increasingly demanding screenshots of local internet speeds before signing contracts. Those making a living from it call for a stable connection, “the bloodline” of the trade. Leaders of the Association representing BPO workers lobby hard enough to win a limited “whitelisting” concession that grants priority traffic to a handful of firms during service dips. Liberalisation was meant to help. Safaricom Ethiopia, licensed in 2021, boasts 10 million active customers across 3,100 sites, while the state-run Ethio telecom has rolled out 5G in parts of the capital and claims average mobile download speeds of 26.63 Mb/s. However, peak-hour traffic between 4:00pm and midnight still throttles bandwidth for hours, developers see only fleeting gains, and outages last week felled Safaricom’s M-Pesa system, forcing users back onto its rival’s creaking network.

Beneath the surface, infrastructure gaps loom large. Ethio telecom is ripping out ageing copper lines, favoured by cable thieves who hawk the metal in Merkato, and laid capacity for 300,000 new fibre hookups last year, taking the total near 952,000. A 4,000Km backbone feeds the capital, and a Tier III data centre glints on its edge, but penetration remains thin. Chronic power shortages bite harder, with industrial users enduring 39 interruptions a month, lasting 21 hours in aggregate. The operator’s stopgap fix is that more than 500 diesel generators have been installed or overhauled in the past three years, and solar kits power 140 relay sites. Network engineers insist the real solution is smarter—solar arrays, microwave links, and live monitoring of battery levels and bandwidth.

For now, the pitch to foreign investors and remote employers rests on faith that upgrades can outpace demand. Ethio telecom’s mobile-data customers leapt 80pc last year to 46.6 million, while Safaricom adds 31,000 SIMs daily and sees data usage per head jump 50pc to 6.5Gb a month. Until those numbers translate into the kind of seamless connectivity freelancers need to meet a deadline on time, the country’s dream of becoming the continent’s outsourcing powerhouse will remain, like so many Zoom calls here, agonisingly stuck on mute.

PUBLISHED ON Aug 17,2025 [ VOL 26 , NO 1320]