For the past four years, the government has focussed on setting up communication infrastructure. Currently, the government is campaigning for the set up of broadband connectivity so that internet services are accessible in homes. Through the ministry of Information and communication, the government is holding talks with two operators to further lower broadband costs below Ksh 10,000 and provide a speed of 100 Kbps at residential areas. This should be effective in the next two months.
“The government continues to encourage open access platforms to push broadband connections,” says Dr. Bitange Ndemo, PS Ministry of Information and Communication during a fiber optic seminar yesterday, organized by the African eDevelopment Resource Center in Nairobi. The seminar sensitized industry players on the state of the art fiber optic technology and its applications in Kenya and the world.
Fibre Optic continues to boost broadband connectivity in East Africa. So far East Africa has 7 fiber connections while West Africa has 15 fibre connections. These link the regions to the whole world.
Jim Hayes the president of Fiber Optic Association, an international society of fiber optics based in California says: “In the whole world, 7.2 billion hours are spent in developing broadband in rural homes because fiber optics has become the predominant communications medium, not just for telephones, but also for cable television, security systems and computer networks.”. Speaking as the chief guest at the event, Jim stressed that all broadband communication at some point will travel via fiber.
Fiber use is growing rapidly in internet backbones, wireless system backhaul, security systems, data centers and fiber to the home (FTTH). This immense growth is due to a worldwide expansion of telecommunications, increase in internet data and video traffic and growth in wireless communication.Fiber optics has become widely used in telecommunications because of its enormous bandwidth and distance advantages over copper wires. The application of fiber in telephony is simply connecting switches over fiber optic links.
Commercial systems today carry more phone conversations over a single pair of fiber than could be carried over thousands of copper pairs. Material costs, installation and splicing labor and reliability are all in fiber's favor - not to mention space considerations. In major cities today, insufficient space exists in current conduit to provide communications needs over copper wire.
While fiber carries over 90% of all long distance communications and 50% of local communications, the penetration of fiber to the home (FTTH) has been hindered by high costs. This final frontier for fiber in the phone systems hinge on fiber becoming less expensive and the customer demand for high bandwidth services impossible over current copper telephone wires.Cost effective fibre has been achieved through the development of the passive optical network (PON). The passive optical network (PON) uses optical couplers, both wavelength division multiplexers and simpler splitter/combiners, to allow connection of many customers over one fiber from the CO. Thus a few fibers can support many customers, up to 32 customers on one fiber from the CO to the local splitter. A PON using wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) can be used two ways: It can provide every customer with a dedicated wavelength, greatly expanding bandwidth to any one customer, but a much greater cost.