Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology has extended Telkom Kenya’s agreement to manage the National Optic Fibre Backbone infrastructure (NOFBI).
NOFBI, part of the government’s ICT-related projects aimed at enhancing its service delivery to citizens, will now be managed by Telkom Kenya for the next three years.
The infrastructure connects 29 counties, not only providing local populations with faster internet services but also facilitating implementation of e-government initiatives such as e-health, e-banking, e-farming and e-learning.
“Telkom Kenya has seven field teams comprising 21 engineers in different locations who provide round-the-clock maintenance. A shift team based at Telkom Kenya’s Supervisory Management Centre (SMC) in Westlands monitors all the equipment and cable cuts round-the-clock collaborating with the field team for repairs”, said Telkom Kenya chief executive officer (CEO) Mickael Ghossein, adding that NOFBI experiences an average estimate of 40 cable cuts in a month occasioned by vandalism, road construction and routine maintenance issues.
NOFBI, a joint initiative between the Directorate of eGovernment, Telkom Kenya and Soulco, has received backing through a concessional loan of KSh6.12bn (US$68 million), whose tender has been awarded to the Chinese state-owned networking and telecommunications Huawei.
Among the departments that have adopted this strategy are the Kenya Education Network (KENET), Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA), the Judiciary and the Ministry of Immigration and Registration of Persons.
