The Tanzania
telecommunication company TTCL is planning to sell the internet bandwidth to
the east African neighboring countries including Burundi, Zambia, Uganda,
Malawi and Mozambique. The internet bandwidth will be sold as commodity to
these neighboring countries given that the resilience of Tanzania’s national
ICT broadband backbone has enough capacity to support the project. 
The TTCL
marketing manager Mr. Nicodemus Mngutu our network guarantee on reliability and
availability is around 99.8 percent compared to the other countries in the
region which is below 70 percent.
Rwanda has
already accepted the bid signing in the deal of 10 years with NICTBB the deal
worth 6.7 million USD about 10.7 billion Tanzanian shillings for a contract to
supply 1.244 gigabytes of internet bandwidth.
The
opportunities are there since the land locked countries are facing significant
challenge to getting access to low cost international connectivity. This
purchase of bulk international network will ensure us the ability of the market
throughout the process, he said that.
Among other
countries Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya and Uganda have already shown the
interest to engage in the business. Rwanda currently offer low internet
penetration of 7 percent though the government is targeting to increase it to
12 percent this year.
The cost of
internet is also still relatively high with user spending on average
approximately Rwf 30 (0.05USD) per megabyte in which their government is aiming
to change. It’s believed Mozambique is on the way to accept the deal of being
connected after being motivated by Rwanda the local company Movitel wants
Tanzania to push in into the remaining distance in the border to make it easier
for them to access it.
Tanzania is
going to be the first country in the East Africa Community member to start
selling internet bandwidth to the neighboring country. The ability to do that
has been due to the presence of installed international submarine fiber optic
cables systems Essay and Seacom.