TEAMS high speed cable to be launched on Friday.
The first phase of the TEAMS (The East African Marine System) high speed undersea fibre cable project has been completed and will officially be launched by President Mwai Kibaki this Friday the 12th June 2009. TEAMS is an initiative led by the Government to link Kenya to the rest of the world. TEAMS 5,000 km cable has finally arrived in Kenya and now links Mombasa to Fujairah in the UAE.
TEAMS is the second undersea cable to reach Kenya after the SEACOM cable arrived a couple of months ago. Alcatel-Lucent were contracted in October 2007 to deploy the USD130 million cable. TEAMS current shareholding is made up of the following investors:
- Safaricom: 20%
- Telkom Kenya: 20%
- Government of Kenya:Â 20%
- Kenya Data Networks: 10%
- Wananchi Online: 5 per cent
- Jamii Telecom: 3.5% per
- Access Kenya: 1.25%
- Flashcom: 1.25%
- Others: Econet and Africa Fibre Net of Uganda.
Its going to be interesting to see what happens within the next couple of months to the costs and speeds of internet connectivity in Kenya. Finally, we will have really fast, and, hopefully pretty reasonably priced internet access!
The Author
4 Comments
Hi Moses.
Yes this is great news and is quite revolutionary in Kenya’s development. We all look forward to highbandwidth that is reliable and affordable. With SEACOM and TEAMS the fibre-optic availability will lead to monumentous changes in Kenya. Combined we now have 2.4Tb/s of bandwidth available. When EASSy arrives next year that will rise to 3.8Tb/s, I can bet you prices will come down.
I am also eagerly waiting on the cable since I know that it will open up new ventures for the people of this great nation..
Finally we can have reliable & fast internet speeds… I’ll be happy with ~4Mbps thank you. Kudos to the Kenya government/those involved for hastily bring this about.
@Jellyfish, I think the initial capacity is 120Gbps
…and now all hell breaks loose!