Home About Us Services Projects Press Staff Vacancies Contact us   ::   Improved Broadband services for Uganda by June, 2009 Uganda is to gain access to better and cheaper broadband services by June 2009.Speaking at a stakeholders meeting in Kampala on March 24, Seacom’s Chief Executive Officer Brian Herlihy intimated that the switching of Uganda and other East and Southern African countries to broadband internet would bring a revolution in communication. This means that Ugandans can also be able to enjoy services such as video streaming, gaming, high definition television, HDTV, video conferencing, music downloading and uploading material on social networking sites on the World Wide Web (www). The Data Market in Uganda has been characterized with relatively expensive bandwidth costs for the very low data upload/download speeds, coupled with poor customer care service from the Service Providers. Uganda’s market now stands at 400-600 MB per second; however, the data capacity is expected to rise up to 3GB per second once people start accessing the Seacom broadband internet. Mr Herlihy revealed that that the price of bandwidth would go down by more than 70 per cent down to around $300. The ISPs in Uganda have been paying up to $5000 per MB per second. However, one of the members on I-network forum,(networking site for ICT stakeholders in Uganda) thought this was still be expensive when compared to Europe where a 20MB connection can be attained for only 100USD; an end-consumer and not wholesale price. Mr Herlihy dismissed fears about a possible failure by Uganda and other similar regional countries like Rwanda and Tanzania, still abjectly poor, to raise enough online customers to justify the investment whose cable will cost up to $600 million, Seacom is owned by a consortium of investors including IPS (which is developing Bujagali) Venfin, Shanduka and Harackles. (Refs: Monitor Mar 26, 2009 & I-network forum) Author : Datafundi (U) Ltd    Published on : 2009-04-06

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