SEACOM testing starts

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...

Full Profile

E-mail

SEACOM today officially announced that the critical portions of the subsea cable and land-based infrastructures have been completed on schedule. These include the branching units and shore-ends necessary to direct the traffic to the landing stations across eastern and southern Africa. All cable landing stations including the terminal equipment have also been completed and are operational.

Testing is now underway and will cover the network’s connections, interfaces and Synchronous Digital Hierarchy systems to ensure that optimum configuration and traffic flow is attained before customers go live. The entire system will be operated and controlled through SEACOM’s Network Operations Centre which is based in Pune, India.

According to SEACOM connecting southern and eastern Africa to the rest of the world is the most important aspect of the project and the finalisation of the agreement with Interoute and Tata enables customers to connect to the global fibre network via routes across all major European hubs and onwards to North America and the Middle East and Asia.

The company says that substantial headway was made to ensure that landlocked countries will benefit from the arrival of cheap and plentiful bandwidth. “SEACOM will continue to work closely with these countries to ensure that inland networks are built,” the company says.

Current backhaul solutions cover Johannesburg, Kampala, Kigali and Nairobi.  “The Seacom cable has been a catalyst for fibre and wireless investment across Eastern and Southern Africa.  Seacom has worked with government, private investors and entrepreneurs to help facilitate new telecom infrastructure and content development businesses.”

Brian Herlihy, SEACOM CEO, said: “The team has made tremendous progress over the past couple of months and we are truly excited to finally have the finish line in-sight.

“With the system substantially completed and testing underway, we are one step closer to delivering on our commitment and become the first project to provide eastern and southern African retail carriers with equal and open access to inexpensive bandwidth.”

Over the past 18 months, SEACOM has become synonymous with cheaper and faster broadband across the African continent. To raise awareness of its product offering and benefits, SEACOM embarked on a number of initiatives including an above-the-line advertising campaign and increased presence across various social media platforms.

These include the Seacom blog as well as a presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube; all of which typically require larger streams to exploit their rich multimedia content.

“In a little over a month, southern and eastern Africa will finally get truly connected to international broadband networks. Plentiful and readily available bandwidth will result in lower telecommunications costs and new opportunities across many sectors that will include the call centre and business process outsourcing industries,” said SEACOM.

“Other life-enhancing disciplines such as educational, clinical and scientific research, which rely on the real-time sharing of data around the world, will also become a reality for many Africans organisations.”

SEACOM cable and bandwidth – comments and views