Monday, June 22, 2009

Safaricom Partners With Jamii For Broadband Service

Safaricom has announced that it has entered into a strategic
relationship with Jamii Telecommunications Limited whereby Jamii will
become Safaricom's preferred broadband infrastructure provider.

Safaricom's CEO Michael Joseph says "This relationship is key to the
success of the company's overall data strategy and is an integral part
of our commitment as management to continually enhance the value
proposition for our shareholders. As you know, Safaricom has now
formally migrated to the Communication Commission of Kenya's new
technology-neutral, unified licensing regime and can therefore
effectively offer a broader spectrum of data services using any
technological platform available to it."

Jamii Telecommunications is one of Kenya's leading broadband
infrastructure providers and this alliance effectively gives Safaricom
access to its over 1,000 kilometers' of state-of-the-art metro fibre
network in cities such as Nairobi and Mombasa, with planned
deployments in other key towns around the country.

Mr. Joseph further commented: "We have opted to partner with Jamii due
to a number of considerations such as their proven technical expertise
in the area of managed fibre services, the design and quality of their
network and the fact that this relationship will allow us to make
significant savings on both our operational and capital expenses. We
expect to realize these savings as we replace our legacy micro-wave
transmission network with fibre and to exploit the time to market
advantages that the Jamii fibre footprint gives us in terms of
accessing large corporates, homes, small and medium enterprises so as
to offer them cutting edge "last mile" communication solutions".

Jamii's Chairman and CEO, Joshua Chepkwony confirmed the agreement
with Safaricom, terming it a milestone for the Kenyan information
communications technology (ICT) industry. His company had made a
significant investment in developing its fibre network, he noted, and
expressed confidence that Jamii would be able to comfortably handle
Safaricom's demanding requirements.

The announcement by Safaricom and Jamii of this partnership is made as
the country awaits the coming into commercial service of the 1.28 TB/s
TEAMS (The East African Marine Systems) undersea cable in which the
two companies own a 20% and 3.75%

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