On Tuesday 21 April 2009 08:40:49 am Niles Collins wrote: > Yes the cost of the undersea cables would have to be > shared by all the governments of the nations involved.
While some governments may be involved in this round of cable builds, it's quite common for consortia to be made up purely of private members. > And keeping the access to them open is a very good idea. > But there is still several hundred miles of cable to be > run from the coast inland to Uganda. > > That is where the issue of who pay for what will arise. Well, if ISP's in Uganda want capacity to SEACOM, they'll have to pay whoever runs fibre to the .ug-.ke border (half circuit), as well as whoever runs the fibre from the .ke border to Mombasa (another half-circuit). In actual fact, the .ke half of the cable would likely run to an operator's switching facility within .ke, as would be the same on the .ug side. > If the governments of Kenya and Tanzania sponsor the > running of most of the cable then there will be taxes on > Ugandans to use them. We pay taxes for all sorts of things anyway :-). My issue with using state-run fibre is quality of the service. If previous performance of our governments is anything to go by, I'd feel more comfortable placing my service on a private cable, or a government cable being run by a decent private operator. Until other cable systems (national and submarine) become available, I'd say save a bit of capacity on the satellite links for the time being. > If the lines are privately financed > then the owners have no incentive to allow other > companies on their lines to promote competition. This is not true. Not all fibre owners are necessarily data operators (albeit, many are these days). But even if they are, fibre operators that also have IP divisions will operate as separate entities. No operator can eat up all their capacity alone. They either have to sell it to smaller ISP's as IP Transit and/or lease it to them (either on a bandwidth or IRU basis). The issue is not whether they can do this, but at what cost they do. This is why it's critical that additional cables (both terrestrial and submarine) become operational to drive costs down and increase service quality. > This is > buy far the most expensive part of the project. The > terrain from Mombasa to Kampala would be very difficult > to lay a cable through. It wouldn't make sense to run cable country-to-country. Kenya already has a number of operators that have built (or are building) a national network. Uganda as well. All they need to do is meet at the border. There's no sense for, say, KDN to build cable from Mombasa to Kampala, or for MTN to build cable in the reverse direction. Besides, licensing and regulation issues may arise if either operator tried to build infrastructure in a neighboring country. Suffice it to say, there may not be commercial justification for either operation to setup a business in a neighboring company. Cheers, Mark.
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