Eiissh! Is this thing an excuse, genuine sabotage or not? Poor service.

Just heard Claire Ruto, Safaricom on radio saying there are malicious guys hacking fibre for a living. And I see Safaricom reporting 10 major fiber cuts last weeks outside road construction and infrastructure areas.

Then yesterday, cuts in Nairobi, Western, Central...until MPESA upgrade has been postponed.

And who owns this fiber? KDN, Orange, Jamii
Who benefits when these things are cut?

Fiber cuts could be as a result of various reasons:-

1. Sabotage - when competitors disrupt each others services
2. Vandalism - where vandals cut lines of cable to sell
3. Construction works for roads, houses etc
4. Poor cable layout, termination/splicing etc.

He's also talking and he agrees with @sky5 reason 1.
Just 25mins ago @bobcollymore
Now convinced the increase in fibre cuts affecting Safaricom & Orange is sabotage. Govt engaged & helping to solve

and how is this any different from cutting of landline telephone wires or tapping of elec/maji?? Which was/is happening all around you?

Your point being????

http://www.businessdaily.../-/rledxmz/-/index.html



I am all for competition but when players resort to such dirty tricks, we are all losers.

@VVS, these cable cuts are real, nobody's whining.

Sky5... I would go with 1, 3 and 4..

Where are you going to sell fibre?

The construction cuts are understandable though certainly not excusable. Surely there should be a process in place to locate existing infrastructure before one goes digging...

4 is certainly likely.. you contract two vendors to lay cables (for redundancy) then they lay them in the same trench NKT..

Hiyo ya sabotage ni wazimu.. hata mimi I say we come up with the laws that Boston came up with... "economic sabotage"... 10 years minimum

Are these alleged fibre hackers?
Three Suspects; John Karanja Muiya, John Mwangi Mutura and Joseph Ngige Wanyoike arraigned in a Nairobi Court, on charges related to the recent cable cuts on the Safaricom Network. The three face two counts; Preparing to commit a felony(crime) and tampering with telecommunication equipment

I'm sure that there is some industrial espionage going on here- the telecom war is raging, but still, SafCom needs to wise up a bit. They should have run Ericsson MINI-LINK Microwave transmission towers from Mombasa to Nairobi and even Dar first and foremost, then Formed a 4G/Wimax "transmission net" from the Microwave relays to businesses, smaller cities, and homes. That way, you have high bandwidth through the air as a load-balancer, fiber as a primary, and satellite as an on-demand, last ditch backup. Hang some solar panels and batteries from the towers, pay some local guys to keep an eye on them, and you have a really nice self-contained system.

They have already spent the cost of microwave in cut cables. Even here in the US cables get cut and stolen all the time- copper more than fiber, but the microwave is in the air, and they don't go telling everyone where and what they are burying. Sometimes it is under railroad tracks, sometimes under landfills.

Fiber is the fastest, but microwave is now very, very fast, and it's better than connection loss. Same with AccessKenya. I understand the need to lay a nice metro fiber ring, but, look at the obvious- mobile phones grew far faster than landline phones in Kenya. Approach internet the same way. Then, when the demand is there, and the telecom war is over, light up the fiber.