TEAMS (The East African Marine System) is an initiative spearheaded by the government of Kenya to link the country to the rest of the world through a submarine fibre optic cable. It was first proposed as an alternative to EASSy, the East African Submarine Cable System. The Kenyan government had grown frustrated with the ownership model favoured by South Africa, the time it was taking and what it perceived as an attempt by South Africa to control the cable. As a result, in November 2006, the Kenyan government decided to partner with the Emirates Telecommunication Establishment (Etisalat) to build its own fibre optic cable.

Although the Kenyan government has decided to pursue their own fibre optic cable, they are still committed to EASSy.

Five companies — Alcatel-Lucent, Tyco Telecommunication, Fujitsu Corporation, NEC Corporation and Huawei Technologies — had placed their bids for the building of the TEAMs undersea cable.

On October 11, 2007, Alcatel-Lucent were awarded the $82 million contract to lay the cable. They have announced that laying of the cable should be complete in the second quarter of 2009.

Path

The 4500km fibre optic cable is to link the city of Mombasa on the coast of Kenya to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates.

Capacity

The TEAMS cable was originally designed to have an initial capacity of 40 Gb/s upgradeable to 640 Gb/s should the initial capacity be insufficient. The project has since exercised an option in the Construction & Maintenance Agreement (CMA) to increase the capacity to 1.2Tb/s of which 120 GB will be initial capacity at project start. Excess bandwidth will be absorbed for use by the Kenyan government if demand from private operators does not meet expectations.

Impact

Currently, East Africa is the only region in the World that has neither intra - African nor direct access to worldwide international cable networks. The region instead relies on expensive satellite communication. Data costs in the country are among the highest in the World with costs of up to $7000 per megabit of bandwidth. The cable is expected to reduce costs to below $500 per megabit, although UUNET Kenya believes this drastic drop in price to be overestimated and that price drops will only occur once other cables, namely SEACOM and EASSy, are completed to create price competition between them.

A number of regional governments and private sector investors have shown interest in the project. Governments interested in purchasing bandwidth are Rwanda, Southern Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania and Burundi.

Kenya hopes to become a bigger player in Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) as India has done in the recent past. Kenya's nascent call center business has grown from employing 200 people in the year 2006 to 3,000 this year, despite relying on expensive satellite-based communications. Kenya's Ministry of Information and Communications Permanent Secretary Dr Bitange Ndemo has said that in order for the BPO sector to compete, the government must increase its bandwidth to 500 megabytes per second by the end of the year (2007) and subsidize costs until the cable is completed.