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East Africa: Eassy Project Kicks Off On Friday
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The Monitor (Kampala)
12 March 2008
Posted to the web 11 March 2008
Elias Biryabarema
Kampala
The construction of the East African Submarine Cable System, EASSy, will start on March 14, according to a statement issued by the cable's development secretariat in Nairobi.
Commencement of the civil works, the most critical stage of the project, has been made possible after the project's developers secured all the necessary financing.
EASSy is the most advanced of all the sea cables proposed for the East and Southern African region and it will cost $248 million. Upon completion, projected in the last quarter of 2009, it will, for the first time, bring faster and affordable internet to about 250 million people in the region.
Currently East and Southern African is the only region in the world that still solely relies on satellite to connect to the global digital traffic pipeline. That has meant that people have to put up with extremely slow and expensive internet. In turn that has slowed business and stifled the ICT industry generally.
It will run 10,500 kilometers from the continent's southern tip to the Horn of Africa, connecting South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti, and Sudan to the rest of the world. 13 landlocked countries will also be linked to the system via their terrestrial backbone networks to be developed by the participating companies in Uganda, Botswana, Burundi, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Chad, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
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The project is being developed by a consortium of telecom companies with part financing from the international development banks and institutions: IFC (World Bank), African Development Bank (AfDB), the development bank of France (AFD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and KfW (Germany).
Completion of EASSy would "herald a momentous, much awaited, milestone to creating a state of art, high speed, and wideband ICT infrastructure," said the statement. Two other cable projects--TEAMS (Kenyan government) and Uhurunet (Nepad)--are also underway and the fast progress of EASSy is bound to provoke an acceleration of their implementation.
In Uganda, only MTN and Utl are participating in the project and have also collaborated in investing in a terrestrial network which already covers much of central Uganda.
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