KENYA’S Safaricom has announced that it has entered into a strategic relationship with Jamii Telecommunications Limited whereby Jamii will become Safaricom’s preferred broadband infrastructure provider.
Safaricom’s CEO Michael Joseph says, “This relationship is key to the success of the company’s overall data strategy and is an integral part of our commitment as management to continually enhance the value proposition for our shareholders. As you know, Safaricom has now formally migrated to the Communication Commission of Kenya’s new technology-neutral, unified licensing regime and can therefore effectively offer a broader spectrum of data services using any technological platform available to it.”
Jamii Telecommunications is one of Kenya’s leading broadband infrastructure providers and this alliance effectively gives Safaricom access to its over 1 000 kilometers’ of state-of-the-art metro fibre network in cities such as Nairobi and Mombasa, with planned deployments in other key towns around the country.
Joseph further commented: “We have opted to partner with Jamii due to a number of considerations such as their proven technical expertise in the area of managed fibre services, the design and quality of their network and the fact that this relationship will allow us to make significant savings on both our operational and capital expenses. We expect to realize these savings as we replace our legacy micro-wave transmission network with fibre and to exploit the time to market advantages that the Jamii fibre footprint gives us in terms of accessing large corporate, homes, small and medium enterprises so as to offer them cutting edge “last mile”
communication solutions”.
Jamii’s Chairman and CEO, Joshua Chepkwony confirmed the agreement with Safaricom, terming it a milestone for the Kenyan information communications technology (ICT) industry. His company had made a significant investment in developing its fibre network, he noted, and expressed confidence that Jamii would be able to comfortably handle Safaricom’s demanding requirements.
The announcement by Safaricom and Jamii of this partnership is made as the country awaits the coming into commercial service of the 1.28 TB/s TEAMS (The East African Marine Systems) undersea cable in which the two companies own a 20 per cent and 3.75 per cent stake, respectively.
Brian Adero
Nairobi
