Kampala — THE new chairperson of the ICT parliamentary committee, Igeme Nabeta, seems to be raffling feathers as he implements some of the recommendations handed to him by his predecessor, Edward Baliddawa, last month.

Among the issues Baliddawa made public was questions about the cost of the national ICT backbone infrastructure project contained in a brief that queried the total cost of the project.

He indicated that Rwanda is carrying out a similar project to lay 2,300 km of fibre cable at a cost of $38m.

In contrast, Uganda's fibre projected to span 2,130 km will cost $106m, or three times more.

Between last week and this week, the Ministry of ICT has been before Nabeta's committee to have their budget approved, but the committee has asked for an audit of the work so far completed on the first phase of the National ICT backbone project.

This is happening in the wake of a brand-new communications line launched last month by the SEACOM. This becomes Uganda's first connection to the rest of the world directly via undersea optic fibre cable.

SEACOM shall sell bandwidth to ISP companies in Uganda starting at $50 depending of the volumes taken. ISPs are yet to give end users indications on prices and end users are now eagerly awaiting announcements from ISPs on both price and connection to the cable.

Members in the ICT sector have already began clamouring and bargaining among themselves about the costs of bandwidth being extremely too high.

On one mailing list, a member suggests that if the prices do not go down, Uganda as a country, is better if returned to its colonial masters.

The State Minister for ICT, Alintuma Nsambu, has allayed all these fears. He says things are not actually as bad as they have been depicted.

On the cost of the National ICT Backbone, he says, Uganda opted to get the higher-quality optical fibre cable for its national data backbone meaning that even its costs are high.

He said the quality of Uganda's optical fibre cable is very high compared to the cheaper cables being laid in the other countries with which Uganda is being compared.

But again this does not answer the audit question that the legislators are asking the ICT ministry to present. It would appear prudent therefore if before any new budgets are passed, a thorough audit of any past expenditure is satisfactorily presented by the ICT team.

Last Tuesday, Nsambu and his colleagues from the Ministry of ICT were at the Parliament where they presented a response to the ICT Committee. He told the New Vision that they were attempting the clarify on some issues that had been raised last week, including the 'audit'.

He explained that because the documentation was too long, it was given till Thursday for all the parties to study. Today (Thursday, the team returns to Parliament hopefully well-prepared for Nabeta's committee.

On pricing of the bandwidth, Nsambu said it will also come down drastically with time and at the moment the commercialization of the national data backbone begins.

"We have made so many innovations, we introduced cheaper laptops to the public servants and the pricing has become the common pricing in the private sector," he said.

"The public should expect speedy internet, lower pricing for internet connections as we are laying our own fibre optic cable," Nsambu added.

On the problems facing the digging up and cutting of the cables along Jinja Road, Nsambu said this should not be a big problem in the near future because the cables are being laid with the capability to re-route traffic via alternative channels.

He blames the digging up of the cables to problems with land policies and land ownership in the country. He said the government hopes to use alternative channels like the other optical fibre lines laid by MTN and Uganda telecom.

He said the Uganda Electricity Distribuition Company is offering its lines for redundancy purposes as they are also entering the broadband market.

"With some of those measures in places, Ugandans will not suffer from some minor cuts along the transmission lines," said a coinfident Nsambu adding that, "We are now deploying armoured fibre optic cables that can't not be easily cut."

He explained that the bidding process for management of the National ICT backbone is currently on-going and that when a company is finally selected to manage the commercialisation of the cables' services, government's role will only be to oversee and hold the said company accountable for good provision of the backbone's services.