Yesterday, Telkom Kenya announced that it has optimized and expanded 3G and 4G coverage in some of the major towns in the country. The development is preceded by similar projects that have seen the nation’s third-largest mobile operator expand high-speed internet access on mobile in 30 urban centres in Kenya.
At the same time, the carrier revealed that it has been making key investments in its Fibre-to-the-Building (FTTB) network, a product that has always targeted enterprise and corporate customers. The project, which is supported by billions of shillings in investments aims to bolster access, core, transmission and IT component availability. The entire infrastructure purposes to hone network reliability and accessibility.
What’s more, Telkom says that it has dedicated a section of its network expansion budget for national backbone and metropolitan transmission networks. When finished, the project should deliver triple backup features, better service experience, and a broader reach to wholesale customers in the East African region.
The investment will enhance customer data experience and grow reseller capacity to telecom businesses and ISPs in the region who purchase from Telkom. We discussed additional details about Telkom’s hand in the project and the technology behind it in a previous post.
“This demonstrates our commitment to connect the people that keep Kenya on the move with the provision of fast, reliable Internet. These metro loops will facilitate access to the Internet, which plays an important role in the lives of individuals and businesses. It further serves to entrench our position as Kenya’s preferred data network,” says Mugo Kibati, Telkom Kenya CEO.
At the moment, Telkom has optimized metropolitan networks in Nairobi that has seen reduced interruptions. The carrier has laid out a new metro loop to link Mombasa to Telkom’s national backbone, as well as a 1000 kilometre redundancy backbone between the coastal city and Tororo, Uganda.
“Telkom intends to set up similar fibre loops along strategic routes in large towns across the country, to meet the growing demand for broadband by businesses, homes, and individuals,” adds Mr. Kibati. “For broadband revolution to be a reality, the metropolitan bottleneck must be broken with architectural transformations that will enable us to convert bandwidth demand into opportunities. As more and more applications are emerging, we must have matching or even better bandwidth in place,” he concludes.
