On 12/29/05, Nation Media <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
hmmm not really, as the author is deeply confused!
comments inline in color,
apologies to those of yoou using Pine, etc ;-):
A new optic fibre to the Indian Ocean changes the face of
telecommunication
misleading headline, read on
for why
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.
fiber from NBO to Mombasa
gets you nothing if there is no submarine cable landing in Mombasa! At
this point here is not.
The commissioning of the project by March,
so the submarine cable up and
down the East Coast (EASSy project, google for it) will be commissioned
by March?
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.
Not until this fiber from NBO
to
coast is actually connected to existing infrastructure, currently many
hundred of miles away to the North (thousands of miles to the South).
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.
Yes, this is part of what the
EASSy cable will do, but not for 3 years, and several hundreds of
millions of USD
<snip>
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.
Hmm not true, read the nation
today, (Friday). There should be a stroy about an alternative.
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.
true
Are you a journalist?
If you want to write a story about the submarine cable project, talk to
the UCC gents, MTN, UTL, i-network folk, Badru from O2N, me, etc.
Lots of Ugandans know all about it.
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