Sitting down at a local café, William was hoping to get online and check the news, sports and his email, but for those Internet Service Providers in the country connected to Kenya's fiber optic cable outages are consuming the market, Orange Telecom Uganda said in a statement on Tuesday. The break occurred last week, the company said, but they are in the midst of rectifying the problem currently. “It is definitely an extremely frustrating thing to happen in the country because now a lot of people are without online access,” William told Bikya Masr/IT News Africa. The Kenya cable is one of the largest fiber optic cables along the Indian coast and the outages have affected millions. Ugandan Internet customers especially those on Orange are experiencing complete breakdowns in some areas, cut bandwidth or slower speeds. The speed has reportedly dropped from over 512 Mbps that the Telecom offers to about half and quarter in some areas, and for others it meant the inability to get online. The statement from Orange further indicates that the Kenyan fiber optic link has been cut off on the Kenyan side between Nairobi and Nakuru affecting the Internet experience. It says that data traffic is being routed through the back up link. The statement says that the Kenyan technical team is working to ensure that the link is up as soon as possible. BM
