Five years ago, SA had one cable, Sat-3, running down Africa’s west coast and connecting it to the global Internet. Today the continent is surrounded by high-capacity cables, with plenty more, even bigger systems to come. There are now so many cables and such a great deal of capacity that Steve Song, author of the popular
Browsing: Sat-3
The 14 000km West African Cable System (Wacs), the first new sub-sea telecommunications cable along Africa’s west coast since Sat-3 was launched 11 years ago, will be launched officially in about a month’s time. Angus Hay, co-chair of the Wacs management committee and chief technology officer at Neotel, says
BT Group (formerly British Telecom) is expanding its presence in sub-Saharan Africa, including in SA, doubling the number of people it employs across the Middle East and Africa and investing in fibre-optic telecommunications infrastructure, the company said on Tuesday
The US$700m Africa Coast to Europe (Ace) project to lay a high-capacity, 5,1Tbit/s submarine cable between France and SA is making good progress, with news late this week that the system has landed in Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa. The cable, which is co-owned by
A project to crisscross Southern Africa with high-speed fibre-optic telecommunications infrastructure is gathering pace with news that London-headquartered Liquid Telecom has completed the first phase of a network in Zambia. Phase one of the network
BT Group is playing coy over its plans to invest significant capital in fibre-optic network infrastructure in SA, but TechCentral understands an announcement about its plans is imminent. Company executives skirted the issue at a press
Between 2009 and 2010, Africa’s total international Internet bandwidth climbed by 78%, reaching a combined 520Gbit/s by December last year, according to data published by Hamilton Research. The growth has come about as a result of the construction
Dimension Data SA chairman Andile Ngcaba is quietly building a new type of telecommunications business under his Convergence Partners investment vehicle. From satellites to undersea cables
Sub-Saharan Africa will soon be drowning in international bandwidth. France Telecom’s Orange has announced an extension to the Lower Indian Ocean Network (Lion) cable, adding yet more capacity to the east coast of Africa.
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.