Maputo - Construction has started on a landing station for Seacom's $650m undersea fibre-optic cable in Maputo, Mozambique - bringing cheaper high speed internet access one step closer to South Africa.
An inauspicious-looking but significant concrete platform for the landing station has been built in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, 200 metres away from the beach.
Seacom president Brian Herlihy said the station "needs to be away from the floodline" as it will house generators and other electronic equipment.
Seacom will then make a "very unobtrusive" 1.5 metre cut (deeper in some areas exposed to anchors and fishnets) where it can lay the cable from the landing station on land 2-3km into the ocean. This will connect it to the 15 000km-long cable that will link SA to Europe and India via Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia.
"Everyone starts laying the cable on the beach by hand to reduce the environmental impact, and when it gets into the sea, the ship will pick it up."
'Enormous capacity'
Nearly 90% of the cable has been manufactured, and the entire Seacom network will connect all cable sections off the horn of Africa in the second quarter of 2009.
Seacom said its two fibre pairs will have an "enormous capacity" of 1.28 terrabits per second, where pricing will be significantly lower than current satellite pricing.
"Before Seacom, broadband would cost R8 200 in price per meg per month, but after Seacom it will only cost R435 a meg a month. Today we have seen competition reduce it to R800 a month, but we will still be cheaper than them," said Herhily, adding that over time, prices will be reduced further as volumes increase.
"To light up an entire 1.2 terrabits, according to historical data it will take between eight to 10 years for the cable to be full," he said.
Herlihy said that if more light spectrums had to be added to the cable, the size and the closeness of the repeaters would also change; "as you put (in) more fibre pairs, you have to put (in) more repeaters, and just one repeater costs US$2.5m."
According to Herlihy, if a million broadband users in SA had to access the internet simultaneously, one terrabit of international bandwidth would be required. However, SA only has 10 gigabits available, which makes the internet so slow.
"SA is the 21st-largest economy in the world, but the lack of international capacity has been choking the data market in Africa for years," Herlihy said.
Neotel connection
In SA, Neotel will run the landing station in Mtunzini, in KwaZulu-Natal. "Seacom wouldn't want to build fibre side by side (its competitors), as it would rather cooperate with a partner's backbone on land than build its own," said Herhily.
Neotel executive head of enterprise, Stefano Mattiello, told Fin24.com in a telephonic interview: "We are involved with Seacom. We are providing a landing station under our licence."
Even though Seacom owns the international portion of the cable, Mattiello explained that that Seacom as a company cannot operate in SA as it is not registered in SA and doesn't have a licence.
"For the cable to land here it has to have a licence," he said, adding that this was why Seacom chose to partner with Neotel so that Neotel could sell its bandwidth at wholesale prices to SA customers.
He said Neotel would own the SA portion of the cable out at sea, which comprises roughly 40km of fibre-optic cable, as well as the physical landing station at Mtunzini, near Richards Bay in KwaZulu-Natal.
"We are investing in excess of R100m in the cable, and we will also be providing backhaul capacity," he said.
While explaining what backhaul capacity meant, Mattiello said: "No one is going to buy internet capacity that is just going to stop at Mtunzini. The cable can't just stop there; it has to be connected to the rest of Neotel's network on land.?
He said that most of the backhaul capacity was already there, waiting for the cable when it lands in 2009. Seacom will have the cable up and running in January or February 2009 so that it can test the system. It will launch the cable commercially on June 27 2009.
The undersea cable is expected to have a 25-year design life. Once it is lit up, there will be a fleet of ships strategically placed for maintenance and repairs.
If a cable section is damaged, a GPS signal is sent out to a ship notifying it where the damage has occurred. The ship could get that piece replaced within three days (where the ship will cut the cable under water, bring it up to the ship and replace it with a new segment), weather permitting, according to Herlihy.
However, there have been cases where it has taken longer to fix a fibre-optic cable. In 2006, an earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale took out nine underwater cables between the Philippines and Taiwan. This caused a loss of connection between Asia and the rest of the globe, media reports said.
It took almost three months to fix multiple breaks in cables caused by the massive quake.
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