Seacom invests R100m on local network

Undersea cable operator, Seacom, says it has invested R100 million in additional South African infrastructures to meet the continuous high growth in demand for broadband services and applications.

The investment includes the purchase of physical optical fibre links from Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) as well as installing the equipment required for Seacom to manage the network linking KwaZulu-Natal coast, where the Seacom marine cable lands, to two redundant Points of Presence in Gauteng.

The company says initially 100 Gigabit per second of the fibre will be lit and a further 20 waves are expected to be lit within the next 12 months. Using ultra-modern transmission technology of 100 Gb/s per wavelength gives the new link a design capacity of over 8 Terabit per second.

This is in line with plans to expand the marine portion of the cable to over 4.8 Terabits per second, says Seacom.

“This enormous amount of capacity enables SEACOM to align current and future customer needs with the explosion in broadband demand driven by a wave of content rich applications such as cloud computing to meet enterprise requirements such as HD video streaming and IPTV services.”

The company says the investment also supports its recently launched Internet Protocol (IP) platform that will drive the proliferation of content created in Africa and the regional hosting of international content.

Brian Herlihy, Seacom CEO, says South Africa continues to offer tremendous growth opportunities and this investment confirms the company’s view that adequate infrastructure will ensure that the market can absorb new capacity within record time.

“In our continuous quest to improve quality of service, this is one of the many investments that we are making to ensure that we provide our customers with the best possible support  as we continue to build the African Internet based on low-latency, high speed and reliable infrastructure,” Herlihy said in a statement.

Managed by Seacom and its suppliers, the route is the company’s first co-build of this nature. It will be operated in parallel with existing routes and will provide customers with the benefit of protected services delivered across multiple, physically diverse routes and operated by multiple providers.

Suveer Ramdhani, Seacom head of product strategy, says this new capacity will benefit the end user by enabling clients to bring new content rich products to market in a reliable and economical way.

“The scale of the capacity we are making available on the route is yet another first in Africa and you can expect us to continue rolling out more ground-breaking technological developments in the near future,”  Ramdhani said.

Seacom says it believes in a world where the African Internet experience is characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds and interconnected African markets. Today, over a dozen countries across the African continent have access to Seacom’s products and services through its extended network.