SEACOM welcomes positive feedback
SEACOM’s commercial launch a month ago was widely hailed as a significant development in the local telecommunications environment, promising to drive down broadband pricing and bring South Africa in line with international bandwidth standards.
“It has been a month since our commercial launch and we have received positive feedback, on our product and the quality of service, from our customers,” SEACOM said yesterday.
SEACOM Hype
Over the last two years many local journalists and other observers fueled the SEACOM hype which according to many industry experts has created unrealistic expectations by the public. The positive impact of the new international cable system is undeniable, but it may not happen as quickly as many consumers expect and the impact may not be as dramatic as some commentators make it out to be.
Some of the comments which SEACOM published on a recent blog post include “This is one small MB for my laptop, one giant TB for Africa …” and “1.28 Terabits per second-now that’s what I call digital heaven! Seacom, dare I say I love you? Now, don’t make the Africans pay too much!”
While SEACOM has a design capacity of 1.28 Tbps, only 80 Gbps of bandwidth is currently available on the cable. To put this in perspective, Telkom recently announced that the SAT3-SAFE capacity will be upgraded from its current 120 Gbps to 340 Gbps. The SAT-3/SAFE cable system therefore has a significantly higher capacity than SEACOM.
Positive Developments
The hype surrounding SEACOM’s launch may well have left a portion of consumers feeling let down due to a slower than expected filtering down of lower bandwidth pricing. Positive developments are however starting to take place.
Internet Solutions recently announced that it is testing SEACOM and it will not be long before commercial services using bandwidth from the new cable system hits the market.
SEACOM’s open access model means that smaller companies can get direct access to SEACOM bandwidth. These smaller providers have jumped at the opportunity to use the lower-priced SEACOM bandwidth to develop their own broadband products.
While these companies don’t want to give too much away in terms of product development and pricing, consumers should see innovative new ADSL offerings entering the market before the end of the year.
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