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.
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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.
Moments after we finished recording this week’s episode of the TalkCentral podcast, in which we speculated about the likely fate of communications department director-general Mamodupi Mohlala, the news came in that minister Siphiwe Nyanda had fired her. Fortunately — or, perhaps, unfortunately? — we weren’t too far off the mark in our pre-announcement speculation.
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.
The Seacom submarine fibre-optic cable system should be back online by late next week after a repair ship arrived at the site of the fault in the Indian Ocean. “The designated ship has been deployed to the location of the fault where it will proceed to locate the cable on the seabed,” a Seacom spokesman says.
Australia’s government is trying to push the idea of a national broadband network, or NBN, through that country’s parliament. It wants Australian taxpayers to build a A$43bn fibre network that connects 90% of homes with broadband access of up to 100Mbit/s. To put that in context, in SA most households with Internet access are lucky to get an effective 1Mbit/s into the home.
Seacom, the undersea cable, may be offline until 22 July. A Seacom spokesman warned on Friday that repairs may only be finalised much later than initially thought because of various factors, including the depth under the ocean of fault. Seacom went offline on Monday, cutting off broadband users whose service providers buy capacity on exclusively on the Seacom system. The service disruptions have hit MWeb, part of Naspers, and downstream service providers from Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions particularly hard.
Seacom has secured alternative capacity options for its customers, but Internet service providers will be charged a “small premium” to use them. A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya cut off many Internet users on Monday, with repairs expected to take a week or more.
Internet service provider MWeb, part of JSE-listed media group Naspers, is urgently seeking an alternative solution for its broadband customers…