Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei and regional network provider Onatel have been commissioned to build fiber broadband networks for the small African nation of Burundi.
According to IT News Africa, the partners will deploy a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) across the capital Bujumbura, to be used by the government and public sector agencies.
The Bujumbura MAN project is as a result of a grant from the Government of the People’s Republic of China to the people of Burundi. The project shall be installed by Huawei Technologies Company Limited and is to run through the Bujumbura city.
The aim of the MAN project is to implement basic infrastructure for interconnecting government institutions expecting to carry out various applications to be deployed in the future.
Read more: Burundi Gov commissions Metropolitan Area Nework for Bujumbura
'The high cost of diagnosis, medical equipment and software are the many obsta cles to the penetration of telemedicine in Burundi,' she added.
Speaking at a workshop to look into the ways and means to popularize telemedicine that focused on access to health cares for rural populations, Mrs Nibigira also stressed the bad quality of the phone network and the lack of electricity as obstacles to telemedicine.
Read more: Burundi minister bemoans handicaps in telemedicine
Burundi, with the help of the World Bank (WB), is embarking on about 1,300-kilometres of fibre optic to cover all the 17 provinces, the capital Bujumbura and key borders with Tanzania and Rwanda.
Salvator Niyibizi, the Executive Secretary of the Executive Secretariat for Information and Communication Technologies (SETIC) in the Burundian Ministry of Transport, Posts and Telecommunications says completion of the first phase of the cable is expected in the first quarter of 2012.
Read more: Burundi embarks on fibre optic to reduce high internet charges