MTN Rwanda expects to land EASSy cable early next year

MTN Rwanda has said it will increase its data and internet capacity by 22. 4 percent early next year when it connects to Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), the undersea fibre-optic cable linking East African countries and the rest of the world. The Nyarutarama based operator says that if connected to the fibre-optic cable, it will increase its broadband capacity to 355Mb from 200Mb. “We made heavy investment last year in building the infrastructure; this gives us an advantage against our competitors because we were able to introduce WiMax, 3G and Kigali hotspot which attracted more subscribers,” MTN’s Chief Operations Officer (COO), Andrew Rugege said in a recent interview. MTN— which is Rwanda’s largest telecommunication company— currently offers a total bandwidth of 155Mb on fibre and additional 45Mb backup on satellite. MTN Group is the largest operator investor in EASSy, which is deployed along the east and south coast of Africa to service the voice, data, and video and internet needs of the region. The cable is owned and operated by a group of 16 African (92%) and international (8%) telecommunications operators and service providers. Recently EASSy announced that it was increasing its “lit capacity” utilising the latest 40Gbps wavelength technology which enable them to offer the most cost-effective and reliable solution to customers in East and southern Africa. MTN Rwanda is also connected to The East African Marine System (TEAMS) another fibre-optic cable. Management says they plan to connect to more cables to have redundancy in an effort to avoid outages. Official figures released by Rwanda’s Utilities Regulatory Agency (RURA) suggest that MTN Rwanda is the leading provider of data and internet services with a market share of 78.44 percent having surpassed bitter rival Rwandatel. Ends

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MTN Rwanda expects to land EASSy cable early next year