Seacom, operator of the fibre-optic submarine cable of the same name along Africa’s east coast, is building nine land-based Internet access points to store popular Web content closer to where the Internet is accessed.

Six of these “Internet Protocol (IP) access points” are already live – in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Johannesburg (SA), Maputo (Mozambique), Marseille (France), Mombasa and Mtunzini (SA). Another access point will soon go live in Nairobi, Kenya, with Uganda and Rwanda also due to come on stream soon. The system upgrade has cost US$15m.

Seacom will now cache content from popular international websites. “If we find SA consumers, for example, are using Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, that content will be stored locally so the user experience is different.”

By cacheing content locally, latency will be lower, so response times will be quicker, says Seacom’s head of product strategy, Suveer Ramdhani. He says Seacom is talking to content providers, but says he has nothing to announce yet.

By building an IP network on top of its fibre-optic cable system, Seacom will also be able to sell bandwidth to Internet service providers in smaller chunks. In the past, service providers had to upgrade their capacity in large increments — say, from 155Mbit/s to 310Mbit/s. “We can now offer a greater degree of granularity.”

Seacom says its new IP network will allow direct routing of Internet traffic between African countries. “Customers are able to reach multiple countries using the shortest path to the final destination without Internet traffic being transferred via Europe.” — Staff reporter, TechCentral