The Covid-19 pandemic has made Kenyans embrace technology. Kenyans were forced to work from their homes causing a shift to technology for e-learning, e-commerce, electronic financial transactions, and entertainment.
Due to this increased internet usage, the ministry of ICT saw the need to expand the bandwidth capacity for increased efficiency.
Kenyans will start experiencing faster internet speeds fro June this year as the government completes its plans to increase the capacity up to tenfold.
According to KNBS, the total bandwidth capacity in 2019 had increased to 6.2 million Mbps from 2 million Mbps in 2016.
“We will increase the bandwidth by ten times to have faster internet speeds for citizens. The Covid-19 pandemic has made us think and work differently. The internet has become everything to us, we are too much becoming dependent on the internet.” Said Mr Ochieng, PS ICT.
He also added that the work towards achieving this is at 95 percent and it will be complete in the next two to three months before Kenyans start enjoying faster internet speeds.
In addition to these, he said cabling from Mombasa to Konza, where the government is setting up a national data centre, smart city facilities, and services to support the technopolis, has been laid to provide a ready-to-plug backbone ICT network.
The PS said that most government agencies will use the data centre which will reduce the cost of doing business and help in the management of government data.
