Somalia organised a consultation meeting in Mogadishu to discuss the impact of recent fibre-cut that cut off Internet access to South and Central Somalia
In addition, the purpose of the meeting was also to discuss the impact of the outage, lesson learned, preventive measures and the state of the national infrastructure in Somalia.
The meeting was hosted by Abdi Ashur Hassan, the minister of post, telecommunication and technology (MPTT). Apart form the government officials, the participants of the meeting also included various industry stakeholders, representatives from universities and research institutions and members of media.
The meeting emphasised the importance of information and communications technologies to the national economy and the lives of the citizens.
The participants agreed that the outage has shown the vulnerability of the country’s connectivity to the rest of world. They said that the service providers need to increase the resiliency of their networks and invest more in the expansion and extension of Internet access to consumers.
Speaking about the cause of outage, Dalkom, Somalia’s telecommunication and internet service provider, said the kinds of challenges the company is facing in bringing submarine cable to the country. Mohamed Ahmed Jama, CEO of Dalkom, mentioned that the company is commissioning a new satellite service aiming to provide restoration and backup capacity for the submarine cable.
Considering the huge impact of the outage on Somalia’s national economy, the meeting further stressed the importance in strengthening relationship between the government and industry to address and sort out issues in order to ensure effective services throughout the country.
During the meeting, the participants agreed that the government should take effective measures to provide leadership in increasing the resiliency of the existing infrastructures, promote addition of extra international capacity and encourage the build out of broadband national backbone network that extends submarine cable bandwidth to the interior of the country.
The service providers acknowledged the need to cooperate more and pool investment capital to invest in major projects, which might be cost prohibitive for single provider.
