Kenya may ask cos to share telco infrastructure

MOMBASA, KENYA: Kenya plans to force telecom operators to share key infrastructure in an effort to reduce sabotage sparked by intense rivalry among competitors, a senior government official said on Wednesday.

Also read: Kenya mobile penetration above 50 p.c.

Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in Kenya's ministry of information and communication, cited frequent cuts to fiber optic cables, which trigger outages, hamper business operations and unnerve investors, as one reason for the move.

“We will have to find ways of forcing sharing of the infrastructure,” Ndemo told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference. “By sharing... there will be less cutting because there is no need to try to be competitive by chopping a rival's cable.”

The Government has constructed a national fiber network but firms have scrambled to put in last mile connections to take broadband to more homes, amid growing demand for data.

“We could ask local authorities to refuse them licences to lay fiber. Local authorities could lay it so we have a shared infrastructure,” he said.

Ndemo did not elaborate on how this would be funded.

Internet usage in east Africa's biggest economy has boomed since 2009 when the first of three undersea cables linking Kenya to the outside world was completed. Data usage stands at over 8 million people, Ndemo said, having doubled in the past year.

The Government also plans to establish an open access network to cut sabotage levels.

“We are going to do one open access system, maybe the LTE (Long Term Evolution). We may partner with some of them (operators),” he said, adding Kenya could makes use of a frequency currently reserved for the military.

Safaricom which is the only operator offering the 3G technology service in the country at the moment, is already testing the LTE technology at five sites in readiness for when the additional frequency becomes available.