The east African fibre optic specialist Bandwidth & Cloud Services Group (BCS Group) decided to set up shop in Maputo at the beginning of June. Headquartered in Nairobi, the company, owned by US national Yonas Maru, intends to gain a foothold in the Mozambican fibre optic network by deploying new cables in order to lease the bandwidth to the country’s mobile phone and internet operators.
BCS Group already has access to The East African Marine System (TEAMS) submarine fibre optic cable, which connects the Kenyan port city of Mombasa to the United Arab Emirates. The Kenyan company owns 1.25% of the cable, alongside the government and the country’s main operators, as well as Etisalat.
However, Kenya is not the main market for BCS, which has a cable running across the country from Mombasa to Kampala, where it is a partner of Indian operator Bharti Airtel. The internet provider has a dense network in Uganda, as well as in Zambia. In Lusaka, Maru has recruited its regulatory director, Susan Mulikita, with whom it will co-administer its new Mozambican entity. Until April 2020, this lawyer headed the Zambian branch of the African telecommunications behemoth Liquid Telecom.
BSC Group is also present in Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern DRC, where its cables supply the eastern city of Goma. Maru’s cables already reaching Mozambique’s borders through Zambia. So far, Maputo is mainly supplied by the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), which is managed by the West Indian Ocean Cable Co (WIOCC).
