Safaricom has signed a five-year lease agreement with Ethiopia’s state-owned power utility, Ethiopian Electric Power enterprise (EEP), to share dark fiber-optic infrastructure.
The shared infrastructure will be part of Safaricom’s network to provide telecommunications services in forms of voice, data, video, text, messages, and conferencing.
EEP has already built a network of Optical Ground Wire (OPGW) cables and Safaricom will utilise these instead of building new ones.
According to EEP, the lease agreement’s first phase allows Safaricom to share 4,097km of the cables, the second phase 2,078km and the third phase 2,904km long optic fiber lines. EEP’s high voltage transmission will also be used as part of Safaricom’s network.
EEP currently has 15,000km of fiber optics lines out of which some 8,745km are leased to Ethio-Telecom.
The company is expected to earn up to $2.7 million a year in the first phase of the infrastructure lease agreement with Safaricom Ethiopia.
Safaricom says it has finalised preparations to launch commercial operations to provide telecom service in Ethiopia, becoming the first private and foreign entity to offer these services in the country.
See Also:
