King Mohammed VI and president of Mali, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, have inaugurated the Malian section of the Trans African optical fiber cable in the nation’s capital city of Bamako. The optical fiber cable links the city of Sikasso (border of Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso) to Gogui (border of Mauritania). Covering over 1,064 km, the optical fiber cable project is funded by Sotelma, a subsidiary of Maroc Telecom. The project took about eleven months of building works and cost about 6 million euros. “It is part of the Trans African optical fiber cable of the Maroc Telecom group linking Morocco, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger along 5,698 km. It had required two years of works and an investment of 13 bln CFA francs,” Maghreb Arabe Presse said. The aim of the cable is to meet the growing demand for high-speed Internet by the international bandwidth. It would also improve the connectivity of the region’s countries and secure telecommunication traffic.
