Telecom Namibia, with an investment of over N$148 million in fiber deployment, hopes to accelerate the roll out of fiber to pass and connect thousands of homes, improving the coverage of their existing 10,676 km (65.2% of national coverage) national fiber backbone.
According to the Chief Executive Officer Stanley Shanapinda, the telco aims to connect more homes and businesses, with packages that start at 4Mbps and up to 50Mbps.
“The packages can even go up to 300 Mbps. In December 2021 we automatically upgraded our customers with double the capacity, at no extra costs. To date we have invested over N$148 million deploying fiber. These efforts continue to accelerate the uptake of fiber broadband solutions and help to improve digital adoption rates,” he said.
He said under their mobile Capex plan, “we plan to rapidly increase our current population coverage, and quality of service, from rural areas to national roads, that the logistics and trade sector can take advantage of.”
“We are excited that under the national 5G strategy that was recently announced by CRAN, our sites will be 5G-ready, using the latest standards, to enable real-time cargo monitoring with ubiquitous IoT connectivity. This connectivity and our digitalisation investments can enable NamRA’s digitalisation processes, that will in turn help to meet the goal to eliminate border delays under the advanced ruling programme, a goal that was recently announced by NamRA,” he added.
This comes as over the years, the company has been faced with challenges with access to stable and reliable electricity.
“Between March and June 2022 alone, we have experienced 196,514 minutes (or 136.5 days or over 4.5 months) in downtime, between Cenored, Erongo Red, NamPower and Nored. These disruptions lead to a poor customer experience. We have engaged and will continue to engage our utility counterparts in working on access to stable and reliable electricity supply and faster restoration times,” he said.
This follows a recent World Bank Group report stating that, amongst others, that in Namibia: the costs for Internet data services are high, at an average cost of USD8.30 (or N$142.83);mobile data adoption is at 36 percent, behind regional peers who stand at 52 percent adoption.
Furthermore, Fiber rollout and uptake is slow, with 2.5 subscriptions per 100 people; digital adoption rates are much lower than in peer countries; and the challenge for private businesses to access stable and reliable electricity.
The Fiber deploying investment is part of Telecom’s plans to invest over N$2.3 billion in the next five years to modernise its network and improve quality of service.
Earlier this year, Shanapinda told The Brief in an exclusive interview that this year alone, the company requires at least N$689 million in investment and is seeking to partly fund the requirement through some external funding.
“We are looking at upping our investments to global trends or 18-20 % of our revenue and we have presented those plans to our shareholders. We presented our plan to our board in August and December last year. The revised version has been approved and we presented it to our shareholder in March this year with the changes. We need roughly N$689 million this year to invest in our network and for that we need to go to external funding for a portion of that. That requires approval from shareholder level,” he said.
He fingered the company’s old infrastructure, coupled with cable theft and power disruption, for increased cases of network disruptions.
