Internet outages rock President Ruto’s 25,000 Wi-Fi hotspots plan

President William Ruto presents a copy of the Ministerial Performance Contracts for FY 2023/2024 signed by the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy Eliud Owalo at State House on August 1, 2023. PHOTO | FRANCIS NDERITU | NMG

The free government Wi-Fi hotspots at Nairobi markets have been hit by outages weeks after being launched in a major setback to a plan to roll out 25,000 centres around the country in a bid to drive e-commerce.

A spot check at the various markets in the city this week showed the Internet had gone out, in some cases for months, and where it exists its range has been weakening, much to the frustration of traders.

Merchandisers who spoke to the Business Daily during a series of location visits to City Market, Muthurwa and Wakulima markets said the project, unless urgently rescued, was painting the government in a bad light.

At the City Market, our spot check showed that devices were connecting to the router but there was no connection of the router to the Internet.

Read: How to protect yourself as State plans 25000 Wi-Fi sites

Such incidents happen mostly when the subscription has not been renewed by way of payment or when there is downtime by the provider on the servers.

In response to the concerns, ICT and Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary Eliud Owalo blamed market associations for reneging on their part of the deal to foot recurrent expenditures such as payment of electricity.

“The initial agreement was that we establish the Wi-Fi hotspots, but recurrent expenditures such as payment of electricity were resident with the markets themselves through their respective associations but they started defaulting. So now when the Wi-Fi stops working, people think that the ministry deployed a Wi-Fi that was not sustainable,” stated Mr Owalo.

At Wakulima Market, the connectivity was only concentrated within about half of the compound, the area close to where the router is situated, with the rest of the site experiencing an outage.

Traders said the hotspot, which was launched in December last year, initially covered the entire market but the coverage started shrinking about two months ago.

“The Internet has been off on this end for like two months now. It is baffling because we haven’t seen any tampering with the router and the shrinking of coverage is continuing,” said Lucy Wangui, treasurer of the Wakulima Market Traders Association.

Ms Wangui, who is a green peas retailer, said she had now resorted to buying mobile data bundles so that she can connect to customers online.

“I spend an average of Sh100 per day on data bundles and I have to keep switching it on and off to minimise usage. This has reduced the interactivity time with customers since I am not able to promptly respond to them as I used to do when the Wi-Fi was working,” she said.

Norman Otieno, a shoe seller within the facility, said his business had taken a big hit from the outage since a huge chunk of his customer orders come from online interactions.

“I have a follower base of 17,000 Twitter users while my WhatsApp status receives about 100 views per post on average and this is where most of my customers connect with me from. I have been forced to make adjustments because I can’t afford to lose the grip of those channels and that’s why I now have a weekly budget of Sh300 for bundles,” says Otieno.

At the time of launch, the Wakulima installation was also spreading connectivity to the neighbouring Muthurwa Market. But the Internet has since gone out.

At City Market, a curio trader who declined to be named said the hotspot, which was launched last November, collapsed just a month later.

“When the Internet was working, it came in handy especially when dealing with visiting foreign customers because once they came in and their foreign telephone numbers would not work for normal calls, we used to bank on the connectivity to exchange Internet calls,” he said.

“Now I am back to purchasing data to operate online, and therein comes extra unnecessary costs.”

The revelation came against the backdrop of a one-year progress report released by Mr Owalo on Monday indicating that the ICT ministry had as of July 31 unveiled a total of 421 free public Wi-Fi hotspots across the country.

Mr Owalo said that to alleviate the challenge, the ministry had reached out to the county governments which had agreed to shoulder the burden of paying electricity bills.

Read: Distribute the free Wi-Fi hotspots evenly

During our visit to the markets, however, Wi-Fi routers were still connected to power, meaning the electricity supply had not been interrupted.

The government has lined up plans to make a total of 25,000 free Wi-Fi installations as part of the digital transformation strategy.

The plan includes laying out of an additional 100,000 kilometres of the national fibre-optic network cable, the establishment of 1,450 digital hubs in each of the country’s 1,450 wards, the unveiling of digital labs for skills development and onboarding all government services onto the eCitizen portal.

On Monday the ICT ministry reported that it had already laid 5,280 kilometres of the fibre-optic cable, operationalised 174 digital hubs, institutionalised 74 Ajira digital labs through which 336,000 youth have received training on digital jobs and digitalised a total of 5,084 government services.

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