Telecommunication firm investing in own fibre infrastructure

Last Updated 13 years ago by Kenya Engineer

Kenya’s leading telecommunication service provider, Safaricom embarked on a mission to lay down its own fibre optic cables around the capital, Nairobi.

Safaricom had been hiring their services from Telecom Kenya and MTN as they were the first to install optic fibre in Kenya. Safaricom has however resolved to install their own following the firm’s failure to hit a Sh100 billion revenue target from data services last year.

The firm intends to lay its own fibre optic and save the cost of renting other providers’ infrastructure to deliver services. They are laying the cable from Mountain View to Kileleshwa and will be headed to the CBD in a weeks time.

On 21-22nd of this month, a conference, 9th annual East Africa Com was held in Nairobi where the country’s telecommunication service providers were engaged as well as speakers from the entire digital ecosystem. The topics of discussion included ;digital transformation, broadband & LTE, connecting East Africa, customer experience management, digital services, mobile money, mobile marketing in East Africa and the inaugural APPGIG.
One of the key issues raised in the conference was that of telecoms firms and infrastructure where they debated on if the firms should share the infrastructure of build their own.

The issue left the operators on different pages  with some like Wananchi Group defending those investing in own infrastructure while others like Soliton Telemec and Telkom Kenya against investing on own infrastructure.
In an interview with a local daily, permanent secretary Information and Communications pointed that he warned that firms investing in their own infrastructures risked running into more network maintenance challenges than they currently are experiencing.

“Some of the operators have not factored in the issue of maintenance of these networks they are putting and currently don’t have the internal human capacity to handle this, which in the long run may see them encountering even worse network challenges,” said Dr Ndemo.

While some operators are sharing telecommunications masts and fibre networks, there is no national policy that guides such agreements, which are left mainly to market demands but which some infrastructure providers say should be guided by a policy.

Speaking during the announcement of the project last year, Safaricom CEO Bob Collymore noted the price of data would also fall although the effect would not be felt immediately.