After years of slow growth and outright despair at whether broadband would ever take off on the African continent, research suggests that the market is inching ever closer to a tipping point, according to US-based Reportlinker.com professio nal search engine. 'As submarine cables find their way along Africa's coastlines, the continent is slowly but inevitably emerging from what we have long referred to as the Dark Ages of African bandwidth, an era of bandwidth bondage of sorts, characterized by excessively high prices, near-zero broadband penetration rates and self-defeating regulatory models,' the firm said Tuesday.