The mediocrity will be the death of us. There is no clear policy on the telecoms sector with everyone digging their own trenches for laying fiber. We have each provider running a 3G network covering the same population. There is a lot of duplication and wastage. Institutions must be stronger than individuals and companies. Not playing service to them. <div class="gmail_extra">

<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Philip Musyoki <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:pmusyoki@gmail.com" target="_blank">pmusyoki@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">

<div>Which brings me to the question I have always wanted to ask. We hear every now and then from Bitange Ndemo that Kenya has a capacity of 4.8 Tbps on the international submarine cables, TEAMS, Eassy. LION 2 and Seacom. </div>



<div> </div><div>Yet bandwidths and prices in Kenya have remained at the same level they were since introduction of the cable first by Seacom followed by TEAMS and Eassy then LION 2. Initially I bought the story that the investors wanted to recoup the cost of the cable, never minding cables like TEAMS were heavily subsidized by the Government.</div>



<div> </div><div>4 years on, we still can&#39;t get a reliable ISP to provide even 1 MBps of capacity. Where is all this capacity? </div><div> </div><div>I am sad to say I was expecting home connections of 10 Mbps today at the current prices, if it happens in other countries, it happens in Kenya.</div>



<div> </div><div>There is no way of selling Kenya as the next regional hub is we can&#39;t even provide cheap international capacity for those who want to us. How do we expect to attract big companies who build data centres that reques multiple of Gigabits per second if the cost of 1 Gbps exceed $300,000 (I am just extrapolating current market rates of KES 25,000 per Mbps) while in Kansas Google offers the same to home consumers for less that $100?</div>



<div> </div><div>Can big data consumers set up data centers here. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Akamai, Amazon data centers have links exceeding 100 Gbps, so obviously the can&#39;t setup in Kenya or Africa. But they have been doing so in Ireland, Singapore, Hong Kong. What do these countries have we don&#39;t&#39;? Isn&#39;t their fiber cables made of the same glass as ours? So why the large disparity in prices?</div>



<div> </div><div>Cost of power in Kenya is among the highest in Kenya, where we pay more for fuel and foreign exchange that power itself, yet we want to be a manufacturing hub? Cement from China lands at half the rates in Kenya than local cement.</div>



<div> </div><div>in Kenya we have grown to accept mediocrity and poor service, and they we are told to respect service providers. I guess we are just doomed, to be small irrelevant country, backward and third-world.</div>



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