The cable has landed

cavedog

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"Crews in rubber dinghies lead the optic fibre cable from the ship, Ille-de-Batz, at Mtunzini beach"

http://mybroadband.co.za/photos/data/500/m09p1502cable2.jpg

"Teamwork - hauling in the precious cable"

The 10 000km long undersea EASSy communications cable was finally landed at Mtunzini last week after weather conditions caused a delay.

The East African Submarine Cable System currently being linked along the east African coastline, is scheduled to be ready for commercial service from August.

The cable-laying ship, Ille-de-Batz, parked offshore from the Mtunzini beach last Sunday and during the week ploughed the trench in which the cable will be buried 1m below the seabed for the first few kilometres out to sea.‘This has a minimal impact on the environment, which will soon recover,’ assured Mtunzini Operations Specialist, André Smuts. In all, there are nine EASSy landing stations - in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa, with shore-end landings already having occurred in Mozambique and Sudan.

Interconnection with various other undersea international cable systems will enable traffic on EASSy to seamlessly connect to Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia, thereby enhancing the east coast of Africa’s connectivity into the global telecommunications network. Containing four hollow optic fibres, each the width of a human hair, the cable will be able to handle 16 million phone calls simultaneously at a rate of 10 gigabytes per second.

Telkom’s Managing Executive for Wholesale Services, Alphonzo Samuels, explained that submarine cables hold many benefits. These include superior transmission quality, less delays compared to satellite, high transmission capacity, access to the global optical fibre network, lower unit costs (compared to satellite), no electromagnetic interference and higher resistance against adverse weather conditions.
 
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Hey, I know André Smuts, actually forgot his surname until now.
 
The cable has "landed"? So when it's done will it be "underwatered"? Hehe, I know what it means, just sounds weird.

August seems like some way off, but it's good news nonetheless. The more redundancy the better as this should encourage more suppliers to move from Telkom, forcing them to drop prices.
 
Is it going to reduce Telkom's ludicrous line rentals? No. So am I excited? No.
 
so i'm just going to throw something into the mix here...

a buddy of mine says to me the other day that you can have as many pipes as you want coming into the country - supply isn't the issue, demand is.
according to him, sat3 isn't anywhere near max throughput and there simply aren't enough people in the country wanting broadband to warrant suppliers dropping bandwidth prices.
all of these undersea cables need to recoup their high costs as fast as possible, so milking the end user is still a feasible strategy for them, especially since they have such overkill hardware for such a relatively small market.

it doesn't really make any sense from a free market point of view, but anyway...
any comments on that?
 
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And now another cable has landed.There is no benefit to Neotel users with the Seacom cable and I doubt any benefit to the Telkom users with this cable.I cannot speak for Neotel however for us Telkpm users first sort out the the deteriorating cables and infrastructure inland.Telkom you are currently making us the mockery of the world and as for Neotel I refuse to comment your Internet connection in oversubscribed areas is as bad as Iburst.Lets make a fast buck out of the consumer.
 
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I am tired of getting all excited about SA and ADSL.......

I gotta headache....rolling over and going to sleep.......:D:whistle::D
 
August seems like some way off, but it's good news nonetheless. The more redundancy the better as this should encourage more suppliers to move from Telkom, forcing them to drop prices.

Oops.. I didn't realize the landing point here for EASSy is Telkom's investment. I retract my statement above as I don't see how this will help competition at all.

I'll collect my dummy badge at the door.
 
They can land another 10 cables, but this will still be Africa no matter how many cables there are. I wish I was wrong and we can finally compete with international players, but I just do not expect that to happen in my lifetime.
 
The major problem is the cost of getting that bandwidth to me, ie a telkom line (and then the nerve, charging me twice for the same wire)

Oh how I hate Hellkom
 
Cables? What they are for?
We need last mile change, the rest is secondary.

Wholesaler changes nothing for end user. It depends on end-user ISP.
End-user ISP will get more profit, unless this is non-greed ISP.

Not excited.
 
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