AFTER ANY conflict there are wounds to heal, especially following a civil war like the one Angola has endured on and off for the past 25 years. Reuniting the country and lessening the effects of isolation is exactly what the state-owned telecommunications company Angola Telecom does best. By linking the urban and rural areas of the nation with a viable telecommunications network, Angola Telecom has become a key promoter of peace and reconciliation. "During the past four or five years we have been concentrating our efforts on the rehabilitation of the connections between Luanda and the provincial capitals and today we have all of the provincial capitals connected," explains Angola Tele-com general director and administrator José Gualberto de Matos.

His task has been daunting. Nearly all of the terrestrial telecom links the company installed 10 to 15 years ago were destroyed in the conflict. Today, only one out of every 300 Angolans has a telephone connection, with Luanda having some 55,000 fixed lines, or 70% of the country's total. To sidestep the slow process of laying lines, Angola Telecom has connected the country's 18 provincial capitals via satellite links, but Mr. de Matos acknowledges that this is not the best way to develop a nation's communications service.

"This is our reserve solution since our options are currently limited," he explains. "It is very difficult and expensive, for example, to interconnect the entire country with fiber optics, although we do have a fiber optics ring that connects all the main telephone exchanges in Luanda." Modernizing the existing telecoms infrastructure has also been an Angola Telecom priority, and over the past four years the company has digitalized nearly all of the obsolete analog equipment. "About 95% of Luanda's fixed lines are digitalized, and by mid- year it will be 100%. We have also digitalized the provinces of Cabinda and Benguela and now plan to do the same in the southern regions of L u b a n g o , N a m i b e , Huambo and Kwanza Sul," Mr. de Matos points out.

Meanwhile, the mobile telephone sector has experienced an explosion in Angola, Mr. de Matos says. "People every-where want mobile phones. We started with a small net-work and it became congested right away. Now we provide digital service and have some 25,000 subscribers. Very soon we will have more cellular phones in Luanda than fixed ones." But the pride and joy of Angola Telecom is its US$24- million investment in an ambitious cable project that will connect Angola to South Africa, Gabon, Benin, Cameroon, Nigeria, Senegal, Portugal and Spain by October. "Angola is already connected to the world by satellite and we have direct connections to more than 15 countries.

International traffic has grown about 25% a year over the past four years. This international sub-marine cable project, how-ever, is based on fiber optics," Mr. de Matos explains. The new link will allow Angola to diversify its inter-national connections instead of relying on satellites alone. "Cable has 10 to 20 times more capacity," he notes, "and the cost of mega bits are much lower with cable. In this new era of the Internet, it is very important for a country like Angola to be a part of the information highway." Further upgrades mean a greater need for capital, and the government has accepted the idea that Angola Telecom will eventually have to be privatized to get the financing for a long list of infrastructure projects. "But it is important to regulate how privatization will be done. We need to create the conditions to find both foreign and domestic partners to help develop local businesses," Mr. de Matos says.