A new optic fibre to the Indian Ocean changes the face of telecommunication
Kenya makes a dramatic entry into the information superhighway early in the new year with the completion of an optic fibre project from the Indian Ocean town of Mombasa to Nairobi.
The commissioning of the project by March, is expected to change the face of telecommunication as it is known in Kenya today with data travelling at unprecedented speeds, super clear voices and for once a reliable fixed telephony.
In practical terms, the fibre whose construction works has already reached Athi River-all the way from Mombasa-means that a student who has been spending five hours at a cyber cafe communicating with a foreign university will now spend less that an hour for the same output.
This will translate into less pay for the student, but the bigger picture will mean that multinational companies working in Kenya will finally stop moaning of poor and expensive telecommunication infrastructure.
It also means services like video conferencing will for the first time be possible on a much wider and affordable scale. The development comes at a time when digitization of switches for Nairobi and Mombasa have been completed, and the benefits includes improved call completion rates, more customers using pre-paid services and lower maintenance costs.
But what are fibre optic cables?
This are specially manufactured, hair-thin glass fibre for the transmission of communications in the form of light. They are also used in medical imaging and mechanical engineering inspections.
Going fibre is about limitless bandwidth. To fully grasp the enormity of the impending quantum leap, a few facts are illustrative. The existing Kenyan network uses what is called Synchronous Transfer Mode-One (STM-1). This translates to only about 2000 circuits available for our communication. While on the other hand a service like video conferencing demands 30 circuits, this means we don't have the capacity to enjoy this exciting service on a wide scale.
Consequently, it also means that such value added services are prohibitively expensive.
Enter a fibre network and the scene changes dramatically. Says Mike Ngotho, who runs a software solutions company in Nairobi: "The fibre network will multiply the capacity several thousand-folds. ISPs will have to get their equipment configured to handle the new load."
Though Kenya prides herself as being ahead of other countries in the region in the ICT sector, due to a comparatively superior infrastructure, most potential users of the technology are still repulsed by the continuing inefficiency.
Over the years for example, even though the cost of surfing the web has continued to come down, internet speeds have not shown a concomitant upward swing. Going fibre has been the only option that can kill two birds with a single stone.
Information Communication Technology has been hailed as the next beacon where Kenya's growing economy will be pegged. Kenya losses billions of shillings every year to developed countries due to an ever widening stream of students seeking higher education abroad. However, thanks to online education that started gaining ground about a decade ago, the avalanche is slowly but surely being put on check.
But notoriously slow internet speeds still remain the biggest stumbling block. Currently surfing the internet in an average Nairobi cyber caf for five hours costs 300 shillings, a figure that is still too high for the average income earners, the category where most would-be students belong. Here, the problem has not really been the cost per given time. Rather, it is the speed.
Clearly, speeds that are ten times faster would trigger a boom. Other professionals set to gain are doctors, journalists, teachers and lawyers through cheap logging to professional syndicates where discussions, research sharing, trends and insider information are shared online. | 