[June 28, 2010] Country Defends Fibre Optic Investment Tweet Kigali, Jun 28, 2010 (East African Business Week/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- Rwanda government says its investment in the national fibre optic cable is in the interest of the public. Telecoms last week had raised concerns over the government's direct role in providing telecom services through the national fibre optic network. They believe the government wants to compete with them on internet service provision with its 2,300 kilometres of fibre opticcable under construction across the country. However, the Head of Information Technology (IT) department of the Rwanda Development Board, which implements the national backbone project Mr. Patrick Nyirishema, says the project is in the interest of the public. He says the government decided to invest in its own cable because the private operators had limited fibre. "Back in 2007, the government realised that the operators had limited amount of fibre- in fact at that point it was less than 300 kilometres in the whole country," he says. Realising both the high cost of building the infrastructure and its importance to the development of the country, Nyirishema says the government could not wait for the private sector to invest and it went ahead. According to Nyirishema, the government made a strategic decision to implement the national backbone that would link all the districts, all the towns, and links to nine different border points. "This would be an extensive optic fibre network built in form of rings to ensure high reliability and stability of the network." He says the government invested in the cable to quicken the ICT development and avoid a monopoly on private infrastructure by the big service providers, which would have kept high the cost of service thus denying reliable access to small service providers and the public. "The big operators might prefer a scenario where they have a monopolyon the infrastructure. They make it expensive for everybody but we have seen it over and over again," he says. Mr. Nyirishema says that before the government started the project, consultations were made with the service providers. "The debate back then was; should this be left to the operators to do or should the government invest in it? The decision on the side of the government was to proceed and do this as a public investment." He said although the government went ahead and invested, it revised initial designs of the project and built three extra free ducts (pipes) in which other operators who still wish to have their own cables would plug them on a fee. "This brings down the overall cost of civil works because over 60% of the cost of doing the fibre is civil works," he says. He says when the operators use the government's ducts; it potentially cuts half their costs compared with building their own cable. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]