Tanzania needs to develop a national Information and Communication Technology (ICT) backbone as well as regional and international connectivity, the government has observed.

He was speaking during the World Telecommunications Policy Forum (WTPF). He said despite achievements in ICT, the country needs the backbone since, by June it shall be having a Seacom submarines cable landing point in Dar es Salaam.

The Seacom fibre cable running from South Africa will be switched on for operations in June, following the completion in February of the landing station in Kunduchi, Dar es Salaam, meaning that Southern and Eastern Africa will finally get connected to international broadband networks.

According to the minister, Tanzania has kept abreast of developments taking place in ICT by putting in place appropriate policies, legal and regulatory framework aimed at facilitating harnessing of new technology to boost socio-economic and political development.

Emergence of Seacom submarines is considered a positive step towards regional connectivity that would improve communication in the continent.

President and chief executive of Seacom Brian Herlihy told The Guardian on Sunday that the much awaited fibre cable project is expected to significantly improve the way people on the continent communicate with the world not only in terms of cost, but also what they can do with such a facility.

According to experts, the readily available bandwidth will result in lower telecommunications costs and new opportunities across many sectors such as call centres and business process outsourcing industries.

Sectors such as education, medical and scientific research which rely on real-time sharing of data will also become a reality for many African organisations.

Currently, the use of satellites for data transfer costs about $300 per megabyte per second, while the use of fibre optic cable will reduce it to $100. When fully functional in June, Seacom will provide high capacity international fibre optic bandwidth along the east coast of Africa through South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and Djibouti and onwards to the rest of the world via landing points in France and India.

With a capacity of 1.28 terabits, Seacom's cable will enable bandwidth-hungry African economies to enjoy high definition TV, Internet protocol TV, high broadband Internet and peer-to-peer networks.

Seacom will be the first cable to provide broadband to countries in East Africa which, at the moment, rely entirely on expensive satellite connections.

Seacom Tanzania Managing Director Anna Kahama-Rupia told this paper that four Tanzanians had already been trained at the Seacom Network Operations Centre in India and will be manning the cable landing station in Kunduchi.

Parallel to the marine installation, Seacom has land-based construction such as high-performance optical transmission equipment, which connects customers to inland terrestrial networks, installed at the Maputo, Mumbai and Djibouti cable landing stations.

The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable and the East Africa Marine System are other initiatives that will provide similar services but are still in the pipeline. The former is an initiative of the New Partnership for African's Development (Nepad) while the latter has the support of the Kenyan government. Seacom is a privately funded and majority African-owned firm.

Institutions with stakes in the project include Kenyan Industrial Promotion Services (26.25 per cent), South African Venfin Group (25 per cent), Convergence Partners (12.5 per cent), Shanduka Group also of South Africa (12.5 per cent) and International Herakles Telecom (23.75 per cent).

Seacom has also recruited over 10 experienced local telecommunications professionals from India, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Tanzania to operate and maintain the cable stations.