Hiiraan Online
Friday August 18, 2017
PHOTO COURTESY OF Ministry of Posts, Telecom & Technology, Media and PR Office
Mogadishu
(HOL) - The telecommunication ministers of Somalia and Djibouti have
met to discuss the strengthening of ties between the two nations in the
telecommunication sector.
Min. Abdi Ashur Hassan of Somalia and
Abdi Youssouf Sougueh have met in Djibouti city over the course of four
days to seriously explore the prospect of adding additional submarine
optical cable connection to Somalia in the wake of the three-week
internet outage in July. 11 of 18 Somali regions, including the capital
were without internet after an anchor from a Swiss-owned, Panama-flagged MSC Alice dragged its anchor through the single fibre cable that provides internet to the Horn of Africa nation.
Min.
Hassan stressed that Somalia desperately needs to strengthen its
internet capability if it wants to smoothen the path to economic
recovery. Djibouti, the minister hopes, can provide the solution to
Somalia’s internet woes.
“To act proactively we need to move
forward with the discussions of another cable. And Djibouti is a good
partner in this regard because eight submarine fiber optic cables land
in Djibouti,”
The Somali government estimated that the country lost USD$10 million a day to during the outage.
The following are the major points of the joint statement:
1.
Recalling the submarine cable cut near Mogadishu landing station that
severed international connectivity to a large geographic area in
Somalia, the two ministries recognize the need for at least an
additional submarine optical cable connection to Somalia. The two
ministries agreed in principle to renew and move forward with the
discussions Somali and Djibouti governments and Somali telecommunication
carriers and Djibouti Telecom on the Djibouti African Regional Express
(DARE) cable, which will connect Djibouti and Mombasa with many landing
stations in Somalia.
2. The ministries agreed to promote and
strengthen the cooperation between the ministries in a number of areas,
such as regional interconnectivity, terrestrial optical fiber, cyber
security, ICT regulations, cross border signals issues, spectrum
management, and numbering plan, etc.
3. The ministers agreed to
convene a meeting between the officials of the two governments; Somalia
carriers and Djibouti Telecom in the near future.
You can read the full statement here