Last Updated 14 years ago by Kenya Engineer
Safaricom intends to spend Sh8 billion in laying out fibre optic cables across the country. This comes at a time when telecommunication firms are battling to own stake at the lucrative internet bussiness.The country is also in a move to adopt fourth generation (4G) and shift from the current 3G.
Safaricom intends to deploy an independent fibre-optic network in a bid to curtail their reliance on third parties for wholesale internet access. They will lay down 2,300 km of fibre-optic cable in the next four months, an operation expected to take 18 months.
Britain’s Vodafone, who own 40 percent of Safaricom already has 600km of fibre, and will start adding another 800km from November. As demand for higher band width continues to go up, the company intends to extend the footprint by up to 500km per year in the next three years.
In mid this year, Safaricom initiated talks with a number of local operators, including Telkom Kenya and Essar Telecom Kenya (ETK, or ‘yu’) for the project, but only Airtel had expressed an interest.
The company is highly dependent on fibre for voice and Internet services and will finance the investment internally. Other mobile operators in the country are racing to extend their network coverage across the country to keep up with the growing number of subscribers, up 16 per cent in the first quarter of this year to 29 million users compared with the same period last year. Internet usage grew by 69 per cent to 6.5 million subscribers.
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