In this promoted episode of the TechCentral podcast, Seacom CEO Byron Clatterbuck returns for a discussion about the big trends affecting the telecommunications industry in South Africa and the broader continent, particularly from a data perspective.

Clatterbuck talks about the ever-expanding demand for data from both consumers and businesses and why Seacom sees secondary cities as important next stage of its growth ambitions.

The conversation turns to edge computing and the growing view that, especially as 5G begins to take off, a lot of computational work isn’t, in fact, going to happen in large global data centres but at the edge, close to where it’s most needed for rapid, low-latency applications.

There’s a suggestion that this could put the advantage back in telecommunications operator’s courts, and away from the global cloud giants — Clatterbuck talks about what this might mean for the industry, particularly as carriers and cloud providers begin working more closely together in future.

This is going to require more redundancy, more networks — and certainly more fibre networks to connect everything together, he says.

Finally, the discussion turns to new subsea cables that are planned for construction around Africa, including Google’s Equiano cable on the west coast. What’s the business case for these new systems, and how will Seacom participate in them?

It’s a great discussion — don’t miss it!

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