Ethiopian Review

East Africa will today move closer to ending its isolation as the world’s last region not connected to the global broadband network when a fibre optic undersea cable “lands” at the Kenyan port of Mombasa. The region at present relies on satellite internet links that are slow, unreliable and often prohibitively expensive, problems that have inhibited business activity, public sector efficiency and the spread of internet access.

The connection of two undersea cables to Kenya’s domestic fibre network promises to deliver the kind of infrastructural transformation rarely seen in Africa, a continent infamous for bad roads, ports and power supplies.

At a “landing” ceremony in Mombasa today, Mwai Kibaki, the president, is due to mark the arrival of the $110m Teams submarine cable, which is part-owned by Kenya’s government and Kenyan telecoms companies, including affiliates of Vodafone and France Telecom. Bitange Ndemo, senior official at the ministry of information and communication, said: “We used to call such huge infrastructure projects white elephants because the planning was poor, they never got finished and they never benefited the people. This is the first time we’ve had such a major project go through.”

The arrival of Teams follows that of Seacom, a rival $600m cable project, wholly owned by private investors, which connects several points on the east African coast directly to London, Marseilles and Mumbai.

“The cables are the great hope for this economy. Look around and everything else is down,” said Aly Khan Satchu, a Nairobi-based financial analyst. Other likely beneficiaries are Ethiopia, south Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Mozambique.

Seacom was due to be operational in July, said Jean-Pierre de Leu, its senior vice-president. Teams, which links to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, should be operational by September, said Ndemo. The cables could reduce wholesale internet prices in Kenya from their current level of about $3,000 per megabit per month to as little as $100, said Kai Wulff, head of KDN, a data communications group and Teams shareholder.

Access Kenya, another shareholder and an internet service provider, has bought capacity on both cables, said Jonathan Somen, its managing director. Once the cables are operational the company’s customers could expect to get twice as much bandwidth for the price they pay today, he said. Kevit Desai, chief executive of the Kenya Private Sector Alliance, a business federation, said the potential was huge, but stressed: “The cables are really enablers, not profit centres.” To reap the maximum benefit he said that prices for end users must be as “internationally-competitive” as wholesale connection prices.

- THE PENNINSULA