The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) has contracted PriceWaterhouseCoopers Zambia to review and redesign the Comtel regional connectivity project, according to senior officials.
The project redesign will be funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB), according to Comesa Assistant Secretary General Sindiso Ngwenya. The proposed multinational broadband project is supposed to interconnect Comesa member-country telecommunications networks.
Comtel's goal is to enhance telecom access and affordability across 21 countries in the Eastern and Southern Africa region, including Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Swaziland.
The AfDB is a bank that funds development projects in Africa. Ngwenya said Comtel must be redesigned because most member countries have, over the past few years, developed their own broadband infrastructures, including fiber-optic networks. The redesigned project will integrate these new networks.
"The slow pace at which national telecommunications operators within the region were making payment towards the project has caused delays in implementing the project, and member countries have resorted to developing their own broadband projects. This means redesigning the project," Ngwenya told the IDG News Service this week.
Comtel was supposed to be operational by the third quarter of last year, at a cost of US$30 million.
National telecom operators (NTOs) from 21 countries in Africa agreed three years ago to coordinate pricing and network infrastructure through Comtel in order to lower the region's high telecom costs.
However, progress on Comtel stopped after the Enderberg-Ericsson consortium withdrew from the project in 2005. The project never found a new equity partner.
Comesa is a regional economic bloc headquartered in Lusaka, Zambia, and chartered to accelerate Eastern and Southern Africa's economic growth.