Kenya’s leading telecommunications service provider Safaricom has announced its high quality fibre Digital City project will connect public and commercial buildings with the grid for free, according at HumanIPO.
The Digital City project is projected to end by the beginning of the firm’s next financial year.
Safaricom has completed the first phase, during which it laid over 600 kilometres of fibre in Nairobi and its environs, which include Rongai, Kitengela, Ngong, Kiambu, Ruiru and Athi River.
Nzioka Waita, director of corporate affairs, told HumanIPO that the company is now on the second phase of the rollout, targeting laying a further 300 kilometres in the Nairobi area.
He said Safaricom will then break ground in Kisumu, Eldoret, Mombasa and Nakuru in January 2014, planning to roll out a further 500 kilometres of fibre cumulatively.
“We will be targeting as many buildings as possible. We will start off in Nairobi before rolling out to the other towns as we expand the reach of our high quality metro-fibre,” Waita said.
“The enterprise segment is still nascent in Kenya and we are the only provider with end-to-end capability to deliver fully integrated enterprise solutions, with the added benefit of mobile offerings. The data demands of businesses today require high capacity bandwidth to deliver that content back to the core.”
Waita said, to supplement this, the opportunity to offer seamless services to both the enterprise and consumer segment cannot be ignored.
“Safaricom’s Enterprise Business Unit remains the fastest growing enterprise business in the country as indicated in our half year results. Through this fibre, we we will be able to offer our enterprise customers with a high quality solution that will guarantee them faster speeds and a more reliable service at a cost effective price.”
Waita said Safaricom is envisaging capturing a bigger customer base with the initiative.
“Through this fibre, we we will be able to offer our enterprise customers with a high quality solution that will guarantee them faster speeds and a more reliable service at a cost effective price,” he said.
Safaricom said the Digital City project is not a fibre to the home (FTTH) project, but rather fibre to commercial buildings, targeting enterprise customers with integrated solutions ranging from internet connectivity, unified communications for voice and data, cloud services, hosted PABX , integrated IT offerings and a host of other enterprise solutions.
“We will serve all categories of enterprise customers. The Safaricom Digital City project will be a key driver of one of our core business goals which is to grow the enterprise segment by leveraging our investments in connectivity and data storage to push quality and affordable enterprise solutions with a particular focus on the SME segment,” said Waita
