Today, officials of the Kenya Education Network Trust (KENET), an organisation committed to setting up a cost effective and sustainable private network for tertiary institutions across Kenya, visited the SEACOM Mombasa cable landing station as part of an ICT workshop for its members’ institutions. The purpose of the workshop is to develop the necessary requirements for the budgeting and rolling out of Phase 2 of the KENET project.KENET uses over 500MB of SEACOM’s high speed broadband capacity, currently connected through SEACOM’s point of presence (POP) in Nairobi. KENET then uses its extensive backhaul infrastructure to transmit SEACOM capacity to all of its 75 institutions countrywide.The workshop forms part of talks between SEACOM and KENET to extend their relationship beyond broadband capacity to include the provision of educational networks across Africa, thereby unlocking the benefits of cloud applications - e-learning, e-libraries and information exchange platforms for academic institutions.

Julius Opio, Head of East Africa Region, SEACOM said “Working together with KENET, we have seen some of benefits that affordable broadband has delivered to the advancement of education networks in Kenya. Accessibility is the next step towards realizing a fully integrated African institutional network.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Government of Kenya for providing an enabling environment for SEACOM to continue providing its services in Kenya hence contributing to the growth of high speed broadband uptake in the region.”
SEACOM is the largest service provider of international fiber optic bandwidth along the East Coast of Africa linking Southern and East Africa, Europe and South Asia.