By Macharia Kamau

Increase demand for data services has seen Access Kenya achieve its target for the year, two months ahead of its deadline.

The company’s Managing Director, Jonathan Somen, said the data services provider had signed up 3,000 customers on its residential broadband service, Access@Home, and contracted over 3,100 customers on its corporate broadband service, Broadband Max.

"Growth in customer numbers have been spurred on by, among other factors, the increased speeds following the arrival of the international fibre optic cables, Seacom and the East African Marine System (Teams)," he said.

"We have now broken the 3,000 residential customer barrier, ahead of our target of 2,800 residential customers, and moved past 3,100 corporate customers, our original target for this year."

He added that the company would connect to the Tata point of presence (POP) in Kenya, in the course of this month.

Tata Communications is setting up a POP, which is expected to give service providers further resilience and flexibility, as well as more efficient speeds and routings around the world.

It is configured to automatically offer redundant paths for Internet traffic going north towards Europe and southwards to South Africa well as to Asia and India.

Somen said there is a strong uptake in services from the different categories of customers, and noted that the market has a lot of potential, given that only 3.6 million of the country’s 40 million population had access to Internet services.