Nairobi, August 20, 2009 - AccessKenya Group has today confirmed that it has begun its process of “double bandwidth for free” upgrades for all its corporate customers, with plans on track for implementation of its second international fibre connection from TEAMS next month. 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.
“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. The fibre has significantly reduced the latency of the connection to the internet, meaning that customers have a much better experience for all aspects of their internet service, whether it’s browsing, using VPNs or even watching clips on You Tube! Having thoroughly tested the connection and upgraded the capacities on our local network, we are now ready to start implementing our double bandwidth for free programme for all our customers.” commented Jonathan Somen, Group Managing Director.
“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. Today we are announcing our official target to get that same customer up to a 1mb connection – ideally no 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. 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.”
“However, the good news for our customers is that we have now ordered all the necessary technical components to carry our traffic directly from Nairobi to London on our share of the TEAMS fibre which is expected to go live some time during next month. We have a further 2.5Gb 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 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” concluded Somen.
