The Kigali MAN is especially designed to deliver Internet connectivity at lower cost to all the city's districts. The government will initially lay fiber optics before moving to complete the "last-mile" connections to government institutions, the private sector and homes.
The initiative will enable Rwanda to connect to the Internet internally to support services like digital libraries to be accessed by schools in Rwanda, said Nkubito Bakuramutsa, executive director of the Rwanda Information Technology Authority.
"The government is committed to build the best network that is going to help accelerate our development in e-education, e-health and e-government to promote efficiency," he said.
MANs are large computer networks, usually spanning a city. They typically use wireless infrastructure or optical fiber connections to link their sites. The Kigali MAN is the first step in a multimillion-dollar national backbone construction project that will ring Rwanda, Bakuramutsa said.
Once the Kigali MAN is complete, work on extensive cabling, running between 1,600 and 2,000 kilometers across 30 districts, will commence. Work for the entire national backbone should be completed by November 2009, according to officials.
Rwanda's construction of a national fiber-optic backbone is in response to the high demand for bandwidth and the need to link large areas of the country by the time undersea fiber-optic cables land at the coast in Kenya and Tanzania.
The cable, according to Bakuramutsa, will especially support Rwanda's private IT sector.
"This will mean that the small ISPs [Internet service providers] don't need to invest in the infrastructure; they can buttress their services on the backbone infrastructure," he explained.
The national backbone, along with plans for a third national telecommunications operator, is expected to greatly enhance ICT penetration in the country.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Edris Kisambira
Quelle/Source: Computerworld Kenya, 18.07.2008
