MWeb fixed-line broadband customers in Johannesburg and Pretoria were without international bandwidth until at least 4pm on Wednesday following a fibre-optic cable break.
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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.
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.
Construction of a new, high-capacity submarine telecommunications cable system linking SA, Angola, Nigeria and Brazil should start early next year and be ready for service some time in 2012. That’s the word from Lawrence Mulaudzi, MD of eFive Telecoms, the SA-based company that is driving the project.
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.
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.