Rwanda | Kigali WiBro Changing Lives

Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame is co-chairman of the ITU Broadband commission, the country which he leads has also set “turning the land of 1000 hills into an ICT hub” as her vision, come the year 2020. Likewise as more effort is accorded in achieving the set target, Some Rwandans have begun registering fruits of an ICT infrastructure that has been put up to gear Rwanda towards her vision.

Habumuremyi Phillip a proprietor of an Internet café in Kigali town says “A lot has improved in the Internet service provision business. At first we only had MTN and Rwandatel as the only Internet Service providers, whose then tariffs were high despite the then slow Internet connections.”

“With entrance of Broadband Systems Corporations’ Kigali WiBro, Kigali Metropolitan Network, Tigo Rwanda and Airtel Rwanda, data prices have greatly reduced and Internet speed greatly increased,” Explains Habumuremyi.

Joseph Sindayigaya is an ardent Internet user, techrwanda.com journalist found him using Gmail’s Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to communicate with his friends from overseas. Sindayigaya says Kigali’s e-life has been made easy, thanks to Wibro.

“Now days I am able to fully communicate through both video and voice chats of google and Skype while stationed anywhere in Kigali. The sound is clear and video image clear. However the case is different when you move out of Kigali,” Explains Sindayigaya.

With competition among ISP providers gradually becoming stiff, data speed and cost has increased and cheapened respectively.

Internet speed has increased from less than 100Kbps to over 2Mbps currently.

Monthly subscription fee of a single computer modem has moved from over 70 US dollars few years back to less than 30 US dollars currently.

Kigali’s WiBro worth Rwf 4.5Billions plus Kigali Metropolitan Network and national back borne (fiber optics) projects are projects initiated by the government of Rwanda and will be privatized after, like Rwanda Development Boards Chief Operation Officer says in the-chronicles, that “Once these companies are up and running smoothly we can then be able to privatize them.”