Poor Uganda network hinders fibre-optic cable

By Elias Biryabarema

KAMPALA (Reuters) - The development of Uganda's Internet market since the arrival of Seacom's fibre-optic cable is being hampered by an insufficient and poor-quality telecoms network, an official from the telecommunications company said.

Seacom's cable was the first underwater fibre-optic connection to reach the east African coast when it arrived in Kenya, finally linking the region to the world's broadband Internet networks.

Seacom had said the cable would vastly increase Internet speeds and slash the cost of bandwidth by about 70 percent in a region that had been dependent on outmoded and costly satellite transmission.

"What often happens is that the backhaul across the land has not developed to a level where its efficiency is the same as the underwater cable and the effect has been that Ugandans haven't felt the impact of our cable," said Aidan Baigrie, Seacom's head of business development.

"So the quality and size of the national networks remains a big challenge," he told Reuters on the sidelines of a telecommunications conference in the Ugandan capital.

The telecommunications firm launched services in South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique using its undersea fibre-optic cable last year.

Costs have come down for some Internet subscribers in neighbouring Kenya and bundles with far higher bandwidth are now available, although actual speeds can be patchy at peak times.

Most Ugandans say they have seen little or no change in the quality of Internet connections, although some Internet service providers have hooked up to the cable.

Baigrie said the flow of digital traffic into Uganda had grown 150 percent since Seacom's launch, underlining a huge potential for growth of the country's data market.

But he said that while Seacom had drastically reduced the cost of bandwidth to Ugandan operators, they were not passing on those reductions to customers.