Corporate organisations will soon be able enjoy double bandwidth free upgrade initiative as AccessKenya Group unveils plans to implement its second international fibre connection from TEAMS next month.Jonathan Somen, the Managing Director says connectivity to the international fibre cables is already being provided to all AccessKenya customers irrespective of whether they connect to AccessKenya through fibre, microwave or copper.

This comes after the listed ISP tapped into the SEACOM, the first submarine cable that went live in July. “All our customers are now enjoying the benefits of our Seacom international connection, where AccessKenya has bought 2.5Gbs – more capacity than any one else in the Kenyan market”, said Somen.

Somen observed that the fibre has significantly reduced the latency of the connection to the internet since now the customers have a much better experience for all aspects of the internet service either through browsing, using VPNs or even watching clips on YouTube.

Having thoroughly tested the connection and upgraded the capacities on their local network, he said the company is ready to start implementing its double bandwidth for free programme for all its customers.

“Historically, AccessKenya has offered its corporate customers the best speeds and value for money in the market, combined with excellent service and reliability. Two years ago, our average customer enjoyed download speeds of around 128k. Once our current upgrade programme is completed, that same customer will enjoy a guaranteed speed of 512k”, Somen said.

The company says it officially targets customers with up to 1mb connection not later than the first quarter of next year.

“An average corporate customer in Europe and North America enjoys speeds of 2mb so this will get Kenyans half way to that long term goal. However, this is just part of the story. As the largest and most established player in the corporate data market, ensuring your connection is redundant is essential”, he continued.

He added: “Seacom is a great cable, but the traffic comes to Nairobi on only one connection which has already suffered a couple of outages in the last weeks. At AccessKenya, we were able to roll our customers back onto satellite service within 10 minutes when these outages occurred, ensuring that all customers were able to resume working quickly, albeit with the higher latencies you experience on satellite. We have spoken with the owners of Seacom about this single point of failure between Mombasa and Nairobi and we believe it is something they are addressing.”

The company has also ordered for the necessary technical components to carry its traffic directly from Nairobi to London on its share of the TEAMS fibre which is expected to go live some time during next month.
“We have a further 2.5 GB of capacity on TEAMS and once this network is up and running, our customers will enjoy full redundancy between the cables with no need for rolling back to the slower satellite”, Somen concluded services. Real fibre based broadband with resilience is almost here and we are pleased that AccessKenya can once again take the lead in its delivery.”