East African Business Week (Kampala)
Bosco Hitimana
11 October 2009
Kigali — The government seeks to secure affordable broadband connectivity on the SEACOM undersea cable systems. Negotiations for the acquisition of the high-speed bandwidth have been going on for weeks.
The government has made a firm request for social and commercial capacity of an STM-4(Synchronous Transport Module level 4) of 620 Megabit per second (Mbit/s) from SEACOM for a period of one year.
SEACOM is a 1.28 Terabit per second (Tbps) capacity undersea fibre optic cable linking South Africa and East Africa to Europe and Asia via the Red Sea, Egypt and the Mediterranean.
Under the terms, SEACOM seeks to deliver the capacity to Rwanda through New Artel-a state-owned Internet Service Provider (ISP). New Artel, would then use less than half of the capacity to connect some institutions of the central government, schools and the universities and sell the rest to the private operators.
The social capacity would be cheaper than the commercial capacity, which is than US$200 per every megabit per second per month compared to US$2,000 on satellite connectivity. The CEO of New Artel Mr. Francis Karemera told East African Business Week that negotiations are still ongoing for SEACOM to deliver. "We agreed on things but to implement them on the side of SEACOM has been a problem. Once SEACOM is ready to do business with the government of Rwanda, we are ready," Karemera said.
SEACOM had committed to establish a virtual Point of Presence (PoP) in Kigali on which the government would get a direct connection.
Rwanda was ready to link her national fibre optic cable network of 2,300 kilometres laid across the country on SEACOM PoP in Kigali.
SEACOM would also use government's fibre infrastructure to provide connection to the private operators in Rwanda and further to Burundi and Eastern DR Congo.
The government of Rwanda and the SEACOM have plans to establish a kind of Private Public Partnership (PPP) model that would secure more capacity for commercial use in Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern DR Congo.
Karemera said that the two parties had agreed to sign the agreement and SEACOM came up with new demands, which delayed signing.
"We have not reached any agreement with SEACOM. If they agree with terms and conditions we gave them, we will sign", commented Mr. Karemera.
SEACOM was not happy about the pricing model and requested a new model, which Rwanda has so far refused to accept.
SEACOM has also not established the PoP in Kigali, which was part of the envisaged long-term partnership.
Instead, SEACOM wanted to go ahead and use third party networks to connect Rwanda which Rwanda has questioned citing data security concerns. However, plans are underway for SEACOM to establish a PoP at the Rwandan border of Gatuna on which Rwanda is ready to tap the connection. Currently, Rwandatel and Altech have connected to SEACOM network.
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