Tom Juma is the Head of ICT and Service Delivery for savings and investments firm Old Mutual Kenya and will be a speaker on Day 1 of the Cloud Africa Com at the Sandton Sun Hotel in Johannesburg on 23-24 May. We caught up with him ahead of the show to get his views on the future of cloud services in Africa.
Kenya’s Safaricom has said it will pull out of a joint venture to build an LTE network in the county if it is forced by its government to use the 2.6GHz frequency band. The company has pointed out that the 2.6GHz frequency band will make it be prohibitively expensive to build out an LTE network across the country, due to its limited range. Safaricom is instead seeking assurances that it will be able to use 700MHz, which requires far fewer base stations and has higher in building penetration capabilities.
The Communications Commission of Kenya (CCK) said that it has lowered “virtually all regulatory fees”, including frequency fees. The move is the CCK’s first major general regulatory fees review since 2000.
Kenyan operator Safaricom has partnered with retail chains Uchumi Supermarkets and Naivas, in order to give M-Pesa subscribers the ability to use the service to purchase goods in the stores.
French mobile operator Orange has joined the Lion2 cable consortium in a pact to build a new submarine cable in the Indian Ocean, extending the Lion cable network to Kenya via the island of Mayotte.
It was apparent at the East Africa Com conference, recently put on in the Kenyan capital Nairobi by Informa Telecoms & Media, that the East African telecom market is undergoing profound change.
African and Middle Eastern carrier Zain streamlined its East African operations this week, with the announcement Thursday that it has awarded three network outsourcing deals to Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN).
Pan-African network services firm Gateway Communications has scored three new licenses in Kenya, allowing it to build infrastructure in the country.
The deal signed between Zain Kenya and Essar Telecom Kenya is a move that indicates operators in developing markets are following the lead of those in Europe by striking agreements to produce opex and capex savings.
East Africa currently has no submarine cable connections to the rest of the world, and as a result all international Internet connectivity in the region depends on expensive satellite services.
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