Altech Stream Rwanda has announced that it has connected to the interim micro-wave internet technology of the International Submarine Optic Fibre Cable System. Recently, SEACOM announced that its 17,000 kilometre, submarine fibre optic cable system linking the Southern and Eastern African regions to global networks via India and Europe has been completed. Altech Stream Rwanda, a local service provider, has begun using the SEACOM submarine cable. For a week now, Altech Stream Rwanda, a subsidiary of Altech Stream East Africa, acquired a connection to SEACOM using microwaves as back-up while awaiting the cable to be extended to Gatuna from Kampala. “We have a connection which has been tested and is fully operational. Rwanda is now connected to the rest of the world. We already have a number of corporate clients using the connection,” the company’s chairman, Sam Nkusi, told The New Times on Friday “It’s better if we have fibre all the way. But rather than wait for 3 months, we have decided to deliver what we have now and people enjoy. It makes business sense.” The long-awaited undersea cable stretching from Mombasa through to Nairobi and Kampala to Gatuna comes with high-speed internet. “I hope RURA is going to assist in this important issue of infrastructure sharing. This is enshrined in the Rwanda Telecommunications Law,” said Nkusi. Currently, only 14 sites are connected to SEACOM around Kigali. Though Nkusi says plans are underway to have seven more sites connected around the city before the connection is extended to the Southern Province town of Butare. SEACOM’s undersea fibre-optic cable system went live late last month, providing African carriers with access to relatively inexpensive bandwidth, compared to the expensive and slow bandwidth from VSAT satellites. Altech Stream East Africa is also made up of Kenya Data Network (KDN) and Infocom of Uganda. KDN has laid an estimated 1500kms of fibre backbone from the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa to Kampala in Uganda. Plans are underway to have an additional 400 km of underground cable from Kampala to Kigali, Rwanda, totalling 6000 km of cable for the project. Recently, Rwandatel agreed to purchase international broadband capacity from SEACOM. In turn, SEACOM secured a backhaul solution for Rwanda on two regional players’ terrestrial networks between Kampala and Kigali. Ends
