The Kenyan government has launched a project to build a 100,000-kilometer national fiber optic cable network, Capacitymedia reported on April 6.
ICT and Digital Economy Minister Eliud Owalo said the network is part of the $600 million Digital Highway Project.
Owalo said, "We have held meetings to discuss and agree on who is deploying which component of the fiber optic cable, and we have reached resolutions in these meetings on the responsibility centers for the deployment of the fiber optic cable, including timelines, targets and everything related to it."
Fiber optic cable is shorthand for optical fiber, which is a fiber made of glass or plastic that serves as a light transmission tool. The principle of transmission is "total reflection of light".
The width of the frequency band represents the amount of transmission capacity.
The higher the frequency of the carrier wave, the wider the bandwidth of the signal that can be transmitted.
In a system consisting of coaxial cables, the best cables have a loss per kilometer of 40 dB or more when transmitting 800 MHz signals.
In contrast, the loss of optical fiber is much smaller, for the transmission of 1.31um light, loss per kilometer of 0.35dB or less if the transmission of 1.55um light, loss per kilometer is even smaller, up to 0.2dB or less.
This is 100 million times smaller than the power loss of coaxial cable so it can transmit the distance much farther.
Someone proposed a new Moore's law, also called the law of optics.
The law states that the bandwidth of optical cables to transmit information, every six months increases by a factor of 1, while the price decreases by a factor of 1.
The development of optical communication technology has laid a very good foundation for the development of Internet broadband technology.
As the material quartz source for making fiber optic cable is very abundant, the cost will be further reduced with the advancement of technology.
Fiber optic cable has other advantages such as lightweight and strong anti-interference ability.
Therefore, in some poor or underdeveloped countries, the development of fiber optic cable will play a very important role in social development.
But for Kenya, a country in eastern Africa, the Internet field seems to be not so well developed.
Kenya's Internet is not bad, it is even in the top three in the field of the Internet in the whole of Africa, but when you look at the whole world to see, it belongs to the backward. This is due to many factors.
A quarter of the population in Kenya currently lacks access to electricity.
To address this challenge, the Kenyan government subsequently launched the Kenya National Electrification Strategy (KNES) in December 2018 - a development blueprint to achieve universal access to electricity by 2022.
With the help of geospatial technology, the strategy establishes the lowest-cost options for powering homes, businesses, and utilities.
In addition to grid expansion and intensification, private sector investment will play an important role in off-grid solutions for mini-grids and stand-alone solar systems.
This strategy has provided a major boost to cable grid development in Kenya.
Ngugi Njuguna of Sydenham, a Kenyan PV equipment supply company, said solar energy utilization in Kenya is increasing year after year due to increasingly affordable PV equipment products from China.
Since 2018, he said, Kenya has added about 35,000 new households or institutions using photovoltaic power generation equipment each year.
The Kenyan government appears to have chosen a complex plan for the joint venture project, according to the report.
The government wants the private sector to build 48,000 kilometers and the state to build 52,000 kilometers, rather than having a company that is 48 percent privately owned and 52 percent state-owned do it alone.
George Njuguna, Safaricom's ICT director, said Safaricom is supporting the project and that of the 48,000 kilometers of lines, "we have already completed 13,000 kilometers."
Fiber optic cable is a way of transmitting information that can convert typical signals into fiber optic lasers, which can be reconverted into important information at the receiving end of the information.
From the transmission end of the information to the receiving end of the information, the information is completed with stable, efficient, and safe transmission, which enhances the efficiency of people to transmit information to each other and has important significance to promote the development of enterprises and society.
The following is an introduction to the role of modern fiber optic cable communication transmission.
Modern fiber optic cable communication transmission technology generally uses the material quartz fiber, with strong corrosion resistance, saving the transmission medium itself loss, and saving transmission materials.
And in the process of optical signal transmission, the optical signal through the absorption and scattering of optical fiber cable, the loss of optical fiber cable will also be greatly reduced.
The construction of fiber optic cable is lighter and lighter, which makes the process of laying and building fiber optic cable more convenient and faster, and the transportation process is also easier.
Compared with metal-type lines, its advantages are more prominent.
The use of fiber optic cable as a medium for communication transmission saves a certain amount of investment in manpower and material resources and reduces unnecessary losses.
Quartz fiber optic access technology term a new technology in communications engineering has an important significance to the development of communications engineering.
The advent of the era of big data, computers, and the Internet gradually into every household, and become people's daily life, and work "necessities".
Fiber optic technology in the media industry is also more effective, mainly in the radio and television and on-demand two sectors.
If transmission instability occurs, resulting in loss of sound and image clips, radio and television broadcasting can be "fatally" affected.
To achieve the best broadcast effect, it is a mandatory requirement to have a more stable and reliable anti-interference transmission method to ensure the maximum picture and sound quality of TV broadcast and radio.
Cable and satellite are more traditional ways to achieve calls.
When fiber optic technology is put into the call, the quality of the call is substantially improved and the threshold for implementation is lower.
Network development fiber optic applications
The use of traditional cable and copper wire exposed the problems of limited transmission information, unstable transmission with loss, and poor anti-interference ability.
The resulting introduction of modern fiber optic communication transmission technology has substantially increased the speed of information transmission.
When optical signals are transmitted in the network system built by fiber optic communication transmission technology, the speed and quality of the entire network system operation can be improved by appropriately increasing the number of electrical nodes.
On top of ensuring signal strength, the efficiency of information transmission is enhanced.
The Kenyan government says it wants to rely on public-private partnerships to achieve its goals quickly.
The government is seeking to strengthen the national ICT backbone by extending fiber optic cable network coverage across the country, reducing the cost of Internet connectivity, and improving the delivery of e-government services.
The Kenyan government wants to connect 40,000 schools and other educational institutions, 20,000 government agencies, and 13,000 healthcare facilities to the network.