Yet another undersea cable has been commissioned for the coast of Africa. When it’s built next year, it will bring total capacity encircling the continent to more than 20,2Tbit/s. In the year 2000 Africa’s total international
Browsing: Eassy
State-owned Internet infrastructure provider Broadband Infraco will launch in the third week of November, offering wholesale access to its network. Infraco CEO Dave Smith says the company’s
In the past month, news has emerged of plans to build yet more high-capacity undersea cables to wire up Africa. With the continent about to be awash in bandwidth, attention needs to shift to bringing broadband to consumers.
Yet more submarine fibre capacity is coming to SA. And, for the first time, a transatlantic link connecting Southern Africa with Brazil is on the cards. SA-based technology investment company eFive Telecoms plans to extend the Main One cable, which connects Europe and Nigeria along Africa’s west coast, to Cape Town.
The East Africa Submarine System (Eassy) cable has not made the sort of splash on the SA broadband market as many had expected it to. The 10 000km-long submarine fibre cable, which runs along Africa’s east coast, is the second new cable to arrive on SA shores in the past year. The first was Seacom, which went live in 2009.
Episode 5 of SA’s business technology podcast, TalkCentral, is good to go. This week, your hosts Duncan McLeod and Candice Jones talk about Cell C’s dramatic overhaul, looking at its bold new branding strategy and its plans to build a powerful new network. We also talk about the apparent demise of Super 5 Media and the launch plans of Walking On Water Television, the increased bandwidth on the East African Submarine System cable, the changes to Nokia’s online music store.
Bandwidth on the East Africa Submarine System (Eassy), a new, 10 000km-long submarine fibre-optic cable on Africa’s east coast, is now available from Neotel and MTN, the two telecommunications operators announced at a press conference on Thursday. At the same time, the design capacity of the system has almost been trebled, going from 1,4Tbit/s to 3,8Tbit/s, making it the fastest cable system serving the African continent. However, only 60Gbit/s on that capacity has been “lit up” so far.
There’s finally some good news on the Seacom front. If all goes according to plan, the undersea cable system will be fully operational again from tomorrow (Friday). According to a Seacom spokesman, physical repairs to the submarine cable are in the final stages of completion. “The entire system is currently undergoing testing before the cable is lowered back into the water,” the spokesman says.
The East African Submarine System, the second high-capacity fibre-optic cable along Africa’s east coast, is live. However, local Internet users will have to wait until at least August to enjoy any benefits. The West Indian Ocean Cable Company, the largest shareholder in Eassy, announced this week that the cable is ready to be tested by its owners.
Seacom says it still hasn’t finalised the last stretch of its undersea cable through the Red Sea in Egypt, a fact that has bedevilled the telecommunications system. A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya plunged SA businesses and consumers into Internet darkness on Monday, with repairs expected to take at least a week to complete. Seacom suffered similar downtime in April when a segment