With mobile price wars seemingly at an end, the Kenyan government is looking for ways to ensure the constant bickering among telecommunications and mobile operators ends. According to senior government officials on Wednesday, they are planning to propose a unified infrastructure base for telecom operators in the country in order to reduce the infighting that has plagued the industry. Secretary of Kenya's ministry of information and communications Bitange Ndemo told reporters that the ongoing cuts to fiber optic cables that has led to outages “hampers” business in the country and reduces the services to citizens. “We will have to find ways of forcing sharing of the infrastructure,” Ndemo told reporters at an industry conference. “By sharing … there will be less cutting because there is no need to try to be competitive by chopping a rival's cable.” According to reports coming out of the ministry and news agencies, the government has established a national fiber optic network in order to meet the growing demand for data and other telecom uses. Telecom operators will be forced to use the new system. “We could ask local authorities to refuse them licenses to lay fiber. Local authorities could lay it so we have a shared infrastructure,” Nedmo said. He did not elaborate on how this would be funded or give a timeframe for meeting the new expectations. BM
