Kenya signs telecom links deal with Alcatel-Lucent

Reuters
December 11, 2007

NAIROBI – France’s Alcatel-Lucent signed an optical fibre construction agreement worth $82 million on Tuesday to lay the first telecoms cable connecting east Africa’s coast with the rest of the world.

The Kenyan initiative aims to build a 5,000 km submarine cable linking the port city of Mombasa with the United Arab Emirates.

“We are excited that at last the east African region will be connected to the rest of the world,” said Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in Kenya’s Ministry of Communication. Construction begins in January.

“This is a concrete promise that by the first quarter of 2009, we will be connected,” Ndemo said.

The government has reduced its shareholding in the project to 20 percent to allow more local operators to buy a stake in the cable, he added.

Neighbouring countries, which had initially been invited to take up some shares, will now have to rely on Kenyan operators that had bought into the project.

Ndemo said Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan and Ethiopia had shown interest.

“They will have to use some of our local carriers to take the bandwidth to them. Considering the politics of cables in Africa, you can’t sit and wait until someone buys,” he said.

A pan-African initiative to lay an undersea cable between South Africa and Sudan has been delayed by squabbling among the partners.

Ndemo said the U.A.E’s Etisalat had already committed to take up a 15 percent share in the Kenyan project. Local operators such as Telkom Kenya, Safaricom and Econet, among others, would also be owning a piece of the project.