en.Wedoany.com Reported - Seacom has activated a high-capacity terrestrial fiber optic route connecting Nairobi, Kenya, and Kampala, Uganda, adding 1Tbps of active capacity on a critical East African internet corridor. The link, passing through Nairobi, Kisumu, and Kampala, is designed with a total capacity of up to 30Tbps, aiming to improve inland access from the Mombasa submarine cable landing station, serving operators, enterprises, cloud platforms, and digital service providers.
The Nairobi-Kampala corridor carries the region's core data traffic, encompassing finance, telecommunications, public services, cloud access, mobile data, e-commerce, and cross-border operations. Seacom is upgrading an existing route rather than building a new one. The company states that the new system, based on DWDM technology, supports 1GE, 10GE, 100GE, and 400GE interfaces, and can flexibly scale from an initial 1Tbps to 30Tbps to meet growing demand.
The business case is straightforward: increasing bandwidth between Kenya and Uganda provides operators with greater wholesale capacity, enterprise connectivity, cloud access, and regional backhaul foundations, while creating better routes into neighboring markets such as Rwanda, Burundi, and South Sudan. Seacom indicates that latency on this route is approximately 7 milliseconds to Nairobi and about 13 milliseconds to Mombasa, which is critical for financial transactions, cloud workloads, and real-time services.
On the technical front, Seacom has implemented Automatically Switched Optical Network technology, enabling automatic traffic rerouting within 50 milliseconds in the event of a failure. In addition to the traditional A104 corridor, the network provides alternate paths via Narok, Kericho, and Kisumu, and utilizes both the Malaba and Busia border crossings. These measures aim to reduce the risk of any single route or border crossing becoming a bottleneck or single point of failure. Seacom's Chief Technology Officer, David Kariuki, described the project as reinforcing a route that already plays a central role in regional connectivity.
For enterprise infrastructure buyers, the new link may broaden regional architecture options. Companies operating between Kenya and Uganda can consolidate more systems, improve backup paths, or support cloud connectivity. Service providers can also leverage the route to expand wholesale or managed services. However, last-mile quality, pricing, on-site maintenance, regulatory coordination, and client-side redundancy will ultimately determine the actual value enterprises derive.
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