African Satellite Broadband Provider Offers New Package

By Rebecca Wanjiku
Fri, September 19, 2008

IDG News Service —

Wananchi Group has reduced the cost of bandwidth to homes and businesses after unveiling a 9-meter dish with 195M bytes of capacity.

The dish has a 40M-byte uplink capacity and a 155M-byte downlink capacity. Wananchi is committed to providing dedicated capacity to corporate and home users at the cheapest rates, said Wananchi chief operating officer Suhayl Esmailjee.

Home users will get dedicated minimum capacity of 256K bps (bits per second), with different bouquets on the downstream depending on need, at a cost of 3,000 Kenyan shillings (US$44.64) per month. Corporate customers will pay 15,000 shillings per month for 256K bps.

Currently, ISPs (Internet service providers) charge 15,000 shillings for 128K bps, and there is no guarantee that the service will always be operational.

The main challenge for Wananchi is redefining speed and reliability in a market where even the most mediocre speeds are labeled as "broadband" or "dedicated," while in practice, the connectivity is shared.

"I would rather not label the new service and leave it to the clients to experience it," Suhayl said. "We are using a combination of 50meg [megabytes] of the capacity, and we have no reason to constrict the pipes; we have opened them up."

Capacity of 256K bps is meaningless if you cannot download a YouTube video without it buffering 50 times, Suhayl said. But Wananchi has tested its new service on 400 customers who were pleased with speeds and VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) quality, he noted.

To utilize the excess capacity, Suhayl said Wananchi is in discussions with local and regional ISPs to share the infrastructure, including the Wananchi fiber, which is laid in several parts of Nairobi.

The new capacity is going to make easier for people to trade online, which will create jobs for youth, said Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication.

The challenge now, Ndemo said, is for all Kenyans to develop local content that can utilize the bandwidth and preserve cultural heritage. There is no need of accessing international e-mail services if reliable services are available locally, he added.

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