Taara in Africa

Bridging the Affordability Gap

Nearly 3 billion people around the world still don’t have access to fast, affordable and reliable connectivity, a disparity largely driven by infrastructure shortfalls and high prices. Though this challenge has remained stubbornly hard to solve, bridging the digital divide could have a profoundly positive impact on communities across the globe. The World Bank estimates that boosting internet access to 75 percent of people in developing countries up from the current level of 35 percent would raise the collective GDP in those nations by $2 trillion and create 140 million new jobs.

For the past seven years, Taara has been developing a new approach to wireless optical communication technology to tackle this challenge. The team’s mission is to bring fast, affordable, and abundant connectivity to people everywhere using beams of light. Like a fiber network in the sky, Taara delivers high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances without the time, cost, and hassle involved with deploying fiber.

The team has beamed high-speed broadband connectivity across rivers, mountains, and dense urban areas, where it’s not possible to dig up the earth and lay cables. However, the team soon found that developing and deploying new technology is only one part of a much-needed solution. Bridging the digital divide requires social and business model innovations, too.

“It is possible to connect the unconnected,” says Bhavesh Mistry, Taara’s Lead for the Middle East and Africa. “But you need a different business model and partnership approach in addition to using a different type of technology.”

Learning from Locals

In 2019, the Taara team partnered with poa! Internet to install a Taara link in Pipeline, a densely packed, lower income community in Nairobi, Kenya. “When we first installed Taara to power Poa’s service, we were expecting to be inundated with signups,” explains Mahesh Krishnaswamy, Taara's General Manager.

However, signups slowed after a few hundred people registered for the service. After looking into these new customer’s user behavior, the Poa and Taara teams saw some unusual data usage patterns. “An average home consumes about 250 gigabytes of data a month," says Andy Halsall, CEO of poa!. "These people were consuming up to 10 times that!”

After more research and conversations with the community, the Taara team learned that the people who had bought the service were reselling it to their neighbors and friends. “They had taken a 10 dollar connection and they were making many times that behind the scenes,” Andy says. “This wasn’t the business model we had imagined," adds Mahesh. "But we knew there was something magical happening here."

Taara’s first power-users had found a way to extend the network those crucial last meters, and were selling it at a price their community members could afford. “Meeting these residents and seeing how creative they were was an ‘a-ha’ moment for our team,” says Bhavesh. “We realized that in order for Taara to be successful, we needed to collaborate with these entrepreneurs who best understand how their communities operate.”

Creating Taara Share

Inspired by what they saw in Nairobi, Taara worked with internet service providers (ISPs), community organizations, and local residents to develop software to make it easier for local entrepreneurs to resell connectivity. The software platform they developed, Taara Share, makes it easy for the ISP to subdivide connectivity into pay-as-you-go microtransactions and share the income with Taara and local entrepreneurs who resell bandwidth directly to people in their communities.

Using the Taara Share app, ISPs can create a business agreement with local resellers, who purchase bandwidth in bulk and sell it to their neighbors in smaller quantities. The software allows internet users and resellers alike to understand how much data has been consumed and how much is left, and ISPs are able to see network performance and utilization.

“We’ve changed the model for the ecosystem and brought a new approach to connectivity that can scale,” says Bhavesh. “Taara Share improves the economics of providing fast, affordable internet into areas where it hasn’t been possible to do previously. In combination with our optical technology and helped by our partners, we’ve removed friction, increased trust, and expanded the economic opportunity.”

Supporting Entrepreneurs in Ghana

Empowering local resellers has reaped economic and social rewards. In the community of Nima in Accra, Ghana, Taara partnered with Ghanaian internet service provider Teledata ICT and Kiva.org, an international nonprofit, to provide financing for local entrepreneurs, including barbers and grocery store owners, to resell connectivity to their neighbors as an extra source of income.

A survey of 96 resellers in Ghana conducted in July 2024 by 60 Decibels revealed that 65 percent of Teledata resellers were making an extra 200 to 1000 Ghanaian Cedi (GHS) monthly, 19 percent were making an extra 1000 GHS to 2000 GHS, and 9 percent were making more than 2000 GHS. These are meaningful improvements in a country where the average monthly income is ~3,000 GHS.

“Nearly 90 percent of resellers reported they were accessing a program like this for the first time,” explains Bhavani Ganesan, Product Manager for Taara Share and lead for the program. “But the entrepreneurialism we saw didn’t surprise us. These resellers and their customers started creating an entirely new economy and using the internet in incredibly productive ways, from finding new jobs, to improving how they ran their small businesses.”

In addition to creating a new source of income, the program impacted resellers in a number of other positive ways. 91 percent of resellers reported that their quality of life had improved, 90 percent said that their self-confidence had increased, and 82 percent said they were more easily able to address emergency expenses.

“We’re not only unlocking a better service, but we’re empowering local entrepreneurs to become catalysts for change in their communities,” says Teledata ICT Founder and CEO Gregory Eid.  Teledata ICT’s extensive network and local expertise have been crucial for the success of this program. “What we’re doing in Nima is not scalable without resellers,” says Gregory. He adds that he plans on establishing technical training programs for interested resellers to help them provide better service to their customers.

Partnering with Community Networks

Taara Share has not only provided a simple platform for local ISPs and local entrepreneurs, it’s been a powerful tool for community networks, too. Community networks are set up and operated by local leaders to bring connectivity to their communities. These networks act as a bridge between consumers and ISPs, formed by local residents who build, deploy, maintain, and market connectivity for their own communities. They play an essential role in the global connectivity jigsaw puzzle, as they connect people least likely to be served by existing infrastructure.

A few years ago, a group of residents from Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, formed Tanda Community Network in an effort to bring more people online and improve digital literacy. Kibera is densely populated and the connectivity infrastructure is poor. Cellular service is expensive, and fiber optic cables are difficult to run and maintain. It’s been difficult to establish internet connectivity and provide ongoing service at rates community members can afford.

In 2022, TandaNet teamed up with Taara, ISP Liquid Intelligent Technologies (which had worked with Taara’s on other broadband projects), and the Internet Society, a global charitable organization dedicated to expanding affordable and reliable connectivity to people everywhere. TandaNet now provides reliable and affordable internet access to 20,000 people in Kibera through more than 135 connections, a four-fold increase from before the collaboration began.