Browsing: Wacs

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.

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.

Seacom may soon cut international bandwidth prices. The cable operator’s first anniversary this month also marks the end of price-cutting restrictions placed on it by some of its anchor tenants. Brian Herlihy, Seacom’s president, says the agreement with anchor tenants — other telecommunications companies — ends on Seacom’s one-year anniversary on 23 July

West African undersea cable Main One has gone live two weeks before schedule. The 1,92Gbit/s cable links Nigeria to Portugal,…

Yet another undersea cable system is coming to connect SA and other African countries to the global Internet, bringing the promise of an international bandwidth glut and lower broadband prices for consumers and businesses. France Telecom has announced the new project’s backers, mainly operators, have signed an agreement for the construction of the US$700m (R5,4bn), 5,1Tbit/s, 17 000km-long system known as the Africa Coast to Europe (

Neotel is stepping up its expansion programme, with a project that will see it deploying fibre-optic infrastructure to 300 buildings,…