22 October 2009

Hallo I- Netters

Am a specialist in fiber optic systems and would like to comment on the following paragraph from the press release

6. It is terribly misleading to compare the costs of laying the cable between Uganda and Rwanda. The Terrain and the specifications are totally not similar. Because of different terrain and distances spanned by the Cable, different transmission technologies have to be deployed. For the NBI/EGI Project in Uganda, the Dense Wavelength and Division Multiplexing (DWDM) was used to facilitate the transmission of video signals over long distances. For a span over shorter distances a transmission technology called Synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) is usually employed. This is deployed at a lower cost than the DWDM.

the ministry should not try to confuse the public wiht technological acyronms, the choice of SDH or DWDM has nothing to do wiht distance rather the capacity, SDH is limited to STM64 or 10Gb/s while DWDM is n*10Gb/s and actually relies on SDH for framing etc as DWDM is really at the physical layer of the OSI protocal stack, to be honest DWDM just allows one to transmit/receive several SDH signals at 10Gb/s.

Clict title to read more and add your opinion

About the cost, the real truth is the DWDM systems are of the same order of magnitude to SDH systems thus depending on the capacity & number of stations/Nodes a DWDN solution will cost $300K per station and will easiley cover 100Km distances without the need for regeneration, from the documentation available about this project about 30 stations are proposed making this $9,000K for the DWDN and SDH infrastructure, the total cable distance for the NBI is less than 3000Km, fiber projects that i have actively been involved in cost at most $15 per meter including the fiber and terminal equipment, we have all seen the casual labour being used for this project (no mechanization) thus the actual cost per meter will be in the region of $11 per meter adding all these costs togther gives us $54M in total against the loans of $90M that the press release is indicating, Note that the $54m is really a rolls royce solution where a Range Rover Sport would work. So its a mockery for us in the industry forthe Min of ICT to justify these high costs when we know better

Will this be like the northern bypass where we are to pay a high price for a single carriage way, wiht some fly overs reported to have cracks

saul besweri