African marine cable construction under way

Construction began this week on the 4,500-kilometer East African Marine System (TEAMS) undersea fiber optic project that will link east Africa to the Middle East and the rest of the world, according to government officials.

Alcatel-Lucent will construct the cable, which should be operational in next year's second quarter, for $82 million. The vendor won a tender for the project last year.

The cable will provide affordable international broadband connectivity to several countries in east Africa, said Kenyan Minister of Information and Communication Samuel Paghisio. The cable, Paghisio said, will initially have a capacity of 40GB but will later be upgraded to 640GB.

"The cable will bring competition on the pricing of bandwidth, which means that the cost of communication in the region will come down," Paghisio said.

The project is a joint venture between the Kenyan government and the United Arab Emirates government through Etisalat Telecommunication. The two governments own 20 percent shares each in the project. Eighty percent of project shares have been opened to the private sector.

The cable will run from Mombasa in Kenya to a global network of fiber-optic cables at Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. The East African region includes Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia.

Kenya is a member of the east African submarine cable system (EASSY), another submarine cable project that will run parallel to TEAMS project under the Indian Ocean from Durban, South Africa, to Port Sudan in Sudan and provide high speed Internet connectivity. The EASSY project will connect 21 countries in the eastern and southern Africa region to the rest of the world.