According to the National Treasury’s Medium Term Expenditure Estimates for communications Sentech received funding to the sum of R21 million for the development of the East African Submarine System (EASSy) during 2007\/08.<\/p>\n
It is interesting that this funding was made available to Sentech after the Department of Communications last year announced that they had officially withdrawn from EASSy.<\/p>\n
Project in jeopardy<\/strong><\/p>\n EASSy recently promised that construction of the cable would start by Mid December 2007, but when they were quizzed about their progress, the project managers simply said that they would not like to comment on either construction of the cable or the project’s progress. <\/p>\n The project has been dogged by continual delays since inception, and questions about the project’s future have been raised by many industry experts.<\/p>\n Market speculation is that Alcatel Lucent has increased its construction costs for EASSy, something which merely heaped coals onto the fire. It is further speculated that various new deadlines were missed which made some shareholders look at other options.<\/p>\n With Seacom already off the mark and promising vast amounts of bandwidth at very competitive rates – far cheaper than EASSy’s early estimates – the project faces a very tough road ahead to ensure continual support and funding.<\/p>\n