Uganda: Huawei Now Ordered to Fix Fibre-Optic Errors
Julius Barigaba | allAfrica.com | 19 April 2010
Nairobi — The Uganda government wants Chinese information technology giant Huawei Technologies to undertake a forensic audit of its own works in laying the country's main fibre-optic cable backbone under the National Backbone Initiative project's first phase, and fix the glaring mistakes at the company's cost. The EastAfrican has learnt that following a directive from the Parliament Committee on ICT, the National Information Technology Authority - which governs the $106 million project - duly wrote to the Chinese firm a few weeks ago. Now Huawei faces the prospect of incurring huge losses after revising major parts of the cable.
The first phase involved laying fibre cable covering Kampala city, Entebbe, Mukono and Bombo towns to allow high-speed data and voice transfers especially between government offices, and lower costs of service delivery besides enhancing transparency and accountability. However, it has emerged that the infrastructure is largely defective, but the contractor has already transferred it to the government. In some parts, the cable was laid in swampland, elsewhere there are no generators, and many trenches are too shallow - at less than the standard 1.5 metres below road level, meaning the cable is exposed to stress and damage.
Cont.: allafrica.com
[FAC: The simultaneous 'dig-ups', which are supposedly being undertaken in the spirit of dual-purposing infrastructure builds, perhaps 'trans-sectoral' activity, as it were, may be backfiring here if Huawei's claims are anywhere near legit. Whatever the case, it certainly appears to be one helluva royal whizzing contest in the making. After reading this story I couldn't resist resurrecting one of my all-time favorite posts from the past: #msg-17532634 ]
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