More international bandwidth coming to SA
The Eastern African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) with a design capacity of 1.4 Tbps went live last week, offering redundancy to SEACOM customers and providing the East Coast of Africa with more international bandwidth.
Initial industry feedback suggests that bandwidth on EASSy is not as affordable to non-investors as SEACOM, but it is still expected to have an impact on the South African international bandwidth market.
South Africa also looks forward to two more submarine cable systems on the West Coast of Africa by the end of next year. The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is set to become operational in the third quarter of 2011 while Main One is expected to land in South Africa before the end of next year.
Kobus Stroeder, chairman of the WACS Management Committee, told MyBroadband that everything is on track for a 2011 launch and that the actual deployment process of the submarine cable has recently begun.
Bernard Logan, Business Development Executive of the Main One Cable Company, said that their cable system is also on track to launch in South Africa in late 2011, and that they are in advanced discussions with partners to extend the cable system from Nigeria to South Africa.
Main One and SEACOM are likely to partner to create a fully redundant solution for South Africa. “We have entered into a memorandum of understanding with Main One cable and to build further with the E5 Telecoms Group as well. We are exploring several initiatives there. I think it’s fair to say that in the very near future Seacom will have a west coast solution as well,” said SEACOM’s Suveer Ramdhani.
The new cable systems are set to significantly boost capacity and redundancy of international bandwidth in South Africa. The following table provides an overview of the cable systems which are expected to be live in South Africa by 2012.
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South African undersea cables
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| Cable system | Capacity | Operational |
| Sat-3/SAFE | 780 Gbps (340 Gbps/440 Gbps) | Live |
| SEACOM | 1.28 Tbps | Live |
| EASSy | 1.4 Tbps | Live testing |
| WACS | 5.12 Tbps | Q3 2011 |
| Main One | 1.92 Tbps | Q4 2011 |
| ACE | 5.12 Tbps | Q2 2012 |
International bandwidth capacity increases in South Africa << comments and discussion
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