The Kampala Monitor is reporting that RwandaTel, Uganda Telecom and Telkom Kenya are discussing construction of a fiberoptic cable from Kigali to Mombassa, passing through Kampala and Nairobi enroute. Telkom Kenya has reportedly finalized plans to build a $5m USD link between Nairobi and Mombassa to accomodate traffic within the nation – the project includes funding for a line to Malaba, on the Ugandan border, to connect to Uganda’s telecommunications network.
The land-based cable is designed to connect to the EASSy cable currently under discussion. The East African Sub-Marine System cable is designed to pass from Djibouti to South Africa, where it will presumably interconnect with SAT-3/SAFE, completing a near-loop of coverage around the coast of the continent.
It’s exciting to see plans for East African land cables. The fact that Ugandan, Rwandan and Kenyan telecommunications providers see a need to interconnect implies that there’s a good deal of voice (and possibly data) traffic between these nations. This exchange of traffic is a precursor to increased commercial activities between these nations, a development that would likely strengthen all participants. (The fragmentation of African economies is considered by many economists one of the major reasons for Africa’s economic stagnation.)
There’s been a great deal of speculation in the Internet Exchange Point community over whether there’s a need for regional Internet exchanges – while east African cables don’t prove a need for data interconnectivity, it does demonstrate a likely market for voice interconnection, which will likely lead towards data interconnection.
What little I can learn about EASSy makes me distinctly uneasy. The project seems to be built on the same model as SAT-3 (South Africa Telkom 3, a 120 Gbit/sec cable that runs down the west coast of the continent, connecting several African nations to South Africa and Portugal.) SAT-3 is a closed consortium, owned by 30+ telecommunications companies (both African and American/European) – new telecommunications companies that want access to the cable have been forced to negotiate with existing consortium owners and are prohibited from building their own fiberoptic connections to the backbone. The result: SAT-3 is basically a cartel – it’s got control over a scarce resource and can charge what it wants for access to the resource. I would very much like to see consumer groups in East Africa organize to ensure that there’s more open access to EASSy than there has been to SAT-3, where numerous small business owners and competitive telephone companies have complained they’ve hard a hard time getting access.