South Africa's cable infrastructure upgrades over 25 years

[Daniel Puchert]

From 560 Mbps to over 400 Tbps — South Africa's Internet revolution

The cable infrastructure enabling South Africa's access to the Internet has drastically improved over the past 25 years, employing new means of multiplexing and increasing capacity from 560 Mbps to over 400 Tbps.

As online applications started consuming more bandwidth, with the advent of media-rich websites, social media, YouTube, and Netflix, user demand for data naturally increased.

 

[G.A.S]

Seacom ... the cable that set SA's internet free.

 

[PaulGherkin]

SAT-2 was the 560Mbps cable. (I suspect it was closer to 565Mbit/s for reasons to do with PDH telecoms technology used at the time)
SAT-3 was in the GBps

 

[Johand]

My house has more capacity than Sat 2!!!

 

[fragtion]

What has happened to SAT2? I get that it has no practical significance and is decommissioned, but has it also been entirely abandoned, or is it still being kept functional and being maintained?

 

[Swa]

All that space going to waste with the poor state of our local industry. It's hard to believe at one point it became the bottleneck.