Rwanda has signed up for a $24 million World Bank project to connect its Internet national backbone to one of the landing sites of the five East African coastal submarine cables now in the pipeline.

The country's ICT officials say they will be calling for bids from submarine cable consortiums to route Internet bandwidth from within its boundaries through Uganda to the coast.

The five cables that the landlocked country can connect to through Kenya and Uganda include the Kenyan-government supported East African Marine System (Teams), the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and the Seacom cable.

Getting it will give Rwandans the opportunity of benefiting form SEACOM’s 1.2Tb bandwidth capacity or the initial capacity of 640Mb from the EASSy project.

Once implemented, the five-year project will reduce the cost of internet bandwidth by 99%, and also stop Rwanda relying on expensive satellite systems to carry voice and data services.

The EASSy project was the first initiative attempting to connect countries of East and southern Africa to the rest of the world via a high bandwidth fibre optic cable system. Rwanda is already represented in the EASSy consortium by MTN Rwanda and Rwandatel.

Rwanda’s government is encouraging investments in ICT as the key driver for improving the delivery of public and private services to grow the economy. Last month, the country signed a $40 million deal with Korea Telecom to build the country’s broadband infrastructure.