Tanzania’s Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) is planning to sell Internet bandwidth to inland countries Burundi, Mozambique, Malawi, Uganda and Zambia.
“Now that the National ICT Broadband Backbone has reached all border points of the country, and that we have already illustrated capability by getting the $6.7-million contract to supply 1.244 gigabytes of Internet bandwidth to Rwanda for 10 years, we are eyeing more markets of the inland countries which can take advantage of our complete network,” said TTCL Marketing Manager Nicodemus Mngutu.
As for why they decided to focus on those countries, he added that the nations face a lot more challenegs than countries that have a coast line and connected to an undersea cable.
“As land-locked countries, they face significant challenges in getting access to low cost international connectivity. This purchase of bulk international capacity on regional and international networks will significantly boost our vision to make bandwidth available to such markets.”
For the contract with Rwanda, TTCL was expected to install, configure, test, commission and activate a temporary link with 155 megabytes bandwidth per second.
Mngutu told Business Standard “that so far Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya and Uganda have also expressed their interest to be supplied with bandwidth. Rwanda currently offers low Internet penetration at 7 per cent though government is targeting to increase it to 12 per cent this year.”
Charlie Fripp – Consumer Tech editor
That is a good idea but the question remains, how much will it cost a local person? What I have notice is that here in Africa telecommunication is very expensive unless am yet to be proved wrong.