[SIZE=7]Kenya’s BRCK Acquires Surf To Become The Biggest Public WiFi Network In Sub-Saharan Africa[/SIZE]
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Ftobyshapshak%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F10%2FSupaBRCK_Zuckerberg_Hersman_Rotich1-1200x800.jpg
BRCK co-founder Erik Hersman demonstrates his SupaBRCK to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in Nairobi in August 2016. Ushahidi co-founder Juliana Rotich looks on.BRCK
BRCK, the remarkable Kenyan company bringing internet access to East Africa, has acquired Surf, another internet provider, to become the largest public WiFi network in Sub-Saharan Africa.
BRCK was formed in 2013 by some of the co-founders of Ushahidi and Nairobi’s iHub as a means of countering Kenya’s notorious power failures with a ruggedized portable hotspot, called BRCK v1. It expanded into education with its Kio Kit that brought multimedia video education into classroom across East Africa. In 2017, it launched a smart system called SupaBRCK which aimed to solve the lack of internet access in Africa by bringing the internet to rural villages.
By acquiring Surf, which is the second-largest public WiFi provider in Kenya, BRCK aims to “grow faster in fixed WiFi locations,” BRCK CEO Erik Hersman told me. “We’re excited about the potential to be across multiple Kenyan cities with this acquisition and to be able to continue growing thing network so quickly.” His plans also include having a new way to enter new geographic markets, starting with fixed WiFi and then with “transportation and edge connectivity”.
The combined companies will now have over 2,000 public hotspots across Kenya, with 500,000 users a month. “This marks an important moment in BRCK’s journey towards meeting Africa’s unique needs and expanding on the continent’s connectivity infrastructure. BRCK believes that the acquisition will go a long way towards supporting Africa’s technological evolution,” Hersman says. For the past year, BRCK has seen month-on-month growth of 20%.
Even though the mobile internet is dominant in Africa, “WiFi is growing,” according to Deloitte’s amusing named “Game of Phones: Deloitte’s Mobile Consumer Survey. The Africa Cut 2015/2016”.
[SIZE=6]YOU MAY ALSO LIKE[/SIZE]
“Explosive growth in data consumption is the next and possibly the last of the organic growth waves in the telecommunications sector,” wrote Mark Casey, the managing director of its media and entertainment sector, and Arun Babu, managing director of its telecommunications sector for Africa. “Africa’s population by 2025 will be nearly 1.5 billion and within that, a meaningful portion will be shifting into the emerging middle class.”
Surf’s parent company EveryLayer was formed in 2015 after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, where a team of people who would become the EveryLayer founders went to a devastated Port-au-Prince to restore connectivity for humanitarian responses, says its CEO and co-founder Mark Summer.
"Despite some of the worst conditions imaginable, we had a high-speed wireless network spanning the city in less than three weeks – in the months following, we partnered to build the systems for much of the rest of the country. It felt so important and revolutionary –we knew that if we could deliver broadband swiftly and cost-effectively there, we could deliver it everywhere.”
The tie-up of the two like-minded teams is an important step for internet access in Africa, which is generally expansive and often very slow outside main urban centers. Surf and EveryLayer will be rebrand BRCK.
“BRCK is rapidly expanding the Moja network, so adding the Surf network and software assets to our company allow us to grow faster in fixed WiFi locations,” says Hersman. “We’re excited about the potential to be across multiple Kenyan cities with this acquisition and to be able to continue growing thing network so quickly. This also means that we’ll have a new way to enter new geographic markets.”
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs-images.forbes.com%2Ftobyshapshak%2Ffiles%2F2017%2F10%2FBRCK_Vanu_Rwanda_Nyawera-school2-1200x896.jpg
The SupaBRCK running on a Vanu base station at the Nyawera school in Rubaya village, Rwanda.BRCK
BRCK currently operates in Kenya and Rwanda and is already the most prolific provider of public WiFi in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Summer praises the “mission alignment” between the two companies. "We feel privileged to join the BRCK family, who has really transformed the technology engineering and connectivity landscape in sub-Saharan Africa. Key to this acquisition has been ensuring that there is mission alignment – I can confidently say that, together, BRCK and EveryLayer are going exponentially grow the number of people with internet access in Africa. It’s not only a corporate mission, it’s also a developmental one,”
Hersman says BRCK constantly tries to find ways to get people who cannot afford normal internet access to get online. “Most organizations have been looking at this as a technology problem, but little innovation has happened in the business model for getting Africans online who don’t have disposable income for relatively expensive data bundles. What we focus on is that demographic, and the Surf asset acquisition allows us to get much broader network coverage in a faster timeline.”
BRCK created its own software platform, called Moja, which is a platform specifically built to get people online who can’t afford to pay. “It’s an onramp to the internet for Africa’s internet users, and a platform for organizations to reach those people. How we do that is by leveraging our hardware expertise to build a service that gives both local content caching and compute capacity, as well as internet connectivity. Business buy content caching, or digital engagement, services on the Moja Network which then subsidize the cost of the internet for the consumer,” says Hersman.
One of BRCK’s key partners is Facebook, with whom it partnered on more network coverage in both Rwanda and Kenya. “Broadly, they support some of our CapEx needs to roll out our network, so that we can make the Facebook Android App downloadable from our nodes,” he says. “It turns out that most African internet users don’t update their phone apps due to the cost of data, and by making it fast and free.”
The Moja network finds a way to make the possible. “We’ve found that working with the Facebook Connectivity team has helped us grow our network faster, and they’ve been a fantastic partner who is driven by getting people online globally,” he adds.
Africa is just the start for the Kenyan connectivity firm. " BRCK’s ambitions are to first create a profitable and replicable business model for Africa’s internet users in East Africa, and then expand to other geographies across the continent," says Hersman. “We see a need for Moja in Africa, but also in Latin America and Asia. As we grow, we will continue to look for partners in the countries that we are expanding to.”
Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine. Based in Johannesburg, his TED talk on innovation in Africa has had more than 1.4m views.