EASSy live on Friday

MyBroadband recently reported that the 10,500 km Eastern African Submarine Cable System, better known as EASSy, will provide South Africa with more international bandwidth within the next few weeks. The actual launch of EASSy will in fact happen sooner than expected.

WIOCC CEO Chris Wood announced on Wednesday that the cable will go live on Friday.  This launch, Wood said, will be a full commercial launch after three successful testing phases.

Wood said that that the testing started on 19 April, including end-to-end testing of the entire EASSy system, has been completed successfully and that Alcatel which constructed the cable will hand over the cable on Friday afternoon.

EASSy will initially light up 30 Gbps (three 10 Gbps wavelengths), with another 80+ Gbps upgrade planned within the next six to twelve months.  Wood added that they are also investigating lighting up 40 Gbps wavelengths in future which will significantly bring down the bandwidth cost on the cable.

In a presentation in Sandton, Wood highlighted the robust design of the EASSy system which safeguards it against a single cable break bringing down the whole system.  The physical cable itself also has a more robust casing than many of the other submarine cable systems to guard against possible cable breaks.

EASSY will not only provide additional capacity to South Africa, but also provide redundancy to cable systems like SEACOM and SAT-3/SAFE.

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