Zimbabwe’s telecoms regulator outlined $123 million was needed to deliver on its plan to bring connectivity to all districts of the country.
News Day reported, the Postal and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ) made this statement in its Zimbabwe National Broadband Plan consultation paper.
The paper outlined plans to deliver connectivity to all districts of Zimbabwe up to 1Mbps connectivity over the next 10 years, it needs to lay an outstanding 1,848km of fibre (to a total of 12,000km) which will cost the aforementioned multi-million-dollar investment.
“Furthermore, there was a need for the deployment of complementary backhaul transmission systems to feed access nodes. To enhance network reliability there was a need for network redundancy for all the links”, said POTRAZ.
“The requirement for stable and uninterrupted power could never be overemphasised. A considerable parentage of the optical fibre cable was over-head, which brought about vulnerability to theft, vandalism and fire.
“There was a need to invest more in underground fibre and optical ground wire (also known as an OPGW) on power pylon,” the watchdog said.
The Zimbabwean government allocated $89 million to the ICT sector earlier this month, finance minister Mthuli Ncube said upgrading infrastructure was a top priority of the country.
