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EASSy to take on Seacom, Sat-3 soon
| Rudolph Muller | April 20, 2010 | No comments |
Rudolph Muller
Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...
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The construction of WIOCC’s East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is complete; promises affordable international bandwidth pricing
The West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) yesterday announced that the construction of the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is complete.
“The joining of the two segments making up WIOCC’s EASSy cable – the so-called ‘final splice’ – took place a few days ahead of schedule at 0040hrs on Monday morning. The installation phase of the project, which started in Maputo, Mozambique in December 2009, was completed on board the cable laying vessel Ile de Batz in the Indian Ocean just off the east African coast,” the WIOCC said in an official statement.
Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC said: “Now that this critical stage of the project has been completed successfully and ahead of time, we will start system testing almost immediately. Once this is finalised, we are looking forward to connecting our first customers to the network from July 2010.”
“A key difference between EASSy and other sub-Saharan systems is that our system will deliver connectivity to Europe via a direct route through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea,” said WIOCC’s CTO Ryan Sher, chairman of EASSy’s Technical Working Group.
“EASSy will be the first east coast system to connect directly to Europe, minimising the time taken for traffic from Africa to reach the key internet peering points in Europe and North America, and vice-versa,” said Sher.
Affordable pricing
According to WIOCC EASSy’s affordable pricing and open access structure promises to revolutionise many African markets.
“At WIOCC, we are offering connectivity from as little as 2Mbps (Megabits per second) for one month, up to multiple Gbps (Gigabits per second) wavelengths for the lifetime of the system, and thereby levelling the playing field for small, medium and large organizations,” said James Wekesa, WIOCC’s Chief Commercial Officer.
Redundancy and reliability
The WIOCC said in a blog post today that the recent outage on the Sea-Me-We 4 cable being used by Seacom to route its connections to Europe reinforces the need for service providers to have capacity on multiple systems to ensure continuity in delivery of their international traffic.
“WIOCC’s EASSy cable has been designed with resilience in mind right from the start. It is the only one in the region based on a ‘collapsed ring’ design end-to-end, enabling traffic to be rerouted the opposite way around the ring, minimising the impact of cable cuts and many of the more common equipment failures,” said the WIOCC.
“Our terrestrial backhaul networks provide alternative routes between landing stations, and the connectivity agreements we are putting in place with a variety of global service providers ensure further protection for international traffic.”
EASSy to take on Seacom, Sat-3 soon << Discussion
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