WACS Arrives Near Cape Town

Submarine communications cable the West Africa Cable System (WACS) has landed in Yzerfontein, near Cape Town. The 14,000km cable, which is expected to dock at 14 different landing points along the Western coast of Africa, before linking to the Canary Islands, Portugal and the UK, is set to commence commercial service in 1Q12. The total capacity of the system is 5.12Tbps, and at least 500Gbps will be lit at launch.

Investors in the WACS cable include South African telcos MTN, Vodacom, Telkom South Africa, Broadband Infraco and Neotel.


Angus Hay, head of strategic business development at Neotel, commented: ‘This is the dawn of a new era in the South African telecommunications industry. 


Since the launch of SEACOM and later EASSy, international bandwidth to South Africa has increased. The landing of WACS sets Neotel ahead of its competitors, as it is the only telecommunications operator that has direct access to all five undersea cables landing in South Africa: WACS, SEACOM, EASSy, SAT-3 and SAFE. 


For Neotel this means that our customers are highly unlikely to experience downtime since the traffic can be moved from one cable to another in case of any cable failure. The level of redundancy, reliability and security will now increase’.

SEACOM Expands to Five More African Countries

East African submarine cable operator SEACOM has announced that its services are now accessible from five additional African nations: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. The network expansion is coupled with increasing resilience through its recent acquisition of east and west coast submarine cable capacity. SEACOM’s approach of partnering with established players to provide broadband services will continue as it develops its products and services based on resiliency, service quality and flexibility in line with customers’ evolving needs.

Suveer Ramdhani, SEACOM’s Head of Product Strategy, said: ‘This latest development is integral to the continued development and expansion of the SEACOM network in Africa and in particular to countries that have had limited access to broadband connectivity. We will continue to build relationships to meet our customers’ growing need for resilient and seamless capacity. This is part of SEACOM’s objective to build the African internet.

Seychelles Gets EUR8 Million For Its International Sub-Marine Cable

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has provided a EUR8 million (USD11 million) loan to the Seychelles Cable Systems Company (SCS) for the installation and operation of the island nation’s first international submarine fibre-optic cable.


The planned 1,930km cable will link the main island of Mahe to the existing Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) in Tanzania, and is expected to be operational by the second half of 2012, according to a report on Afriquejet.com. 


The project will also benefit from a EUR4 million grant from the EU-Africa Infrastructure Trust Fund to support shareholding in the project by the Seychelles government. A statutory dividend from this equity stake will be used to provide free internet access for schools, libraries, hospitals and other social development-related services. 


The EUR27 million overall project cost will be financed through 40% equity and 60% debt, the EIB said. Long-term debt will be co-financed equally by the EIB and the African Development Bank, and equity contributions split between three shareholders – the Government of Seychelles, Cable and Wireless Seychelles and Airtel. 


SCS executive Benjamin Choppy – who is also permanent secretary for ICT in the Seychelles – signed the deal with the EIB, which he called a key milestone for the project, and stressed that the cable will dramatically improve voice telephony and internet access in the Seychelles, with international transmission capacity predicted to be seven times cheaper than current prices.


The EIB previously supported the EASSy project to connect 20 coastal and landlocked countries in East and Southern Africa using a high bandwidth undersea fibre-optic cable and terrestrial links.

Wananchi Gears to Roll Out in Nine Countries With Cisco Deal

Kenyan ISP Wananchi Online has signed a contract with US technology solutions firm Cisco to rollout triple-play services across nine countries in East Africa. The deal is supported by East Africa Capital Partners and Viscous Capital, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cisco.

Wananchi Online, which claims to be the only triple-play operator in East Africa intends to tap into markets in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Malawi, Ethiopia, Sudan and Zambia. The contract will see Wananchi Online deploying Cisco's integrated end-to-end network technology solutions - encompassing its ‘Borderless Networks’ and collaboration and data centre virtualization solutions.

Wananchi intends to extend a backhaul and last-mile fibre network across Nairobi and Mombasa in Kenya and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. It will also build a WiMAX wireless network to provide uncapped internet access in smaller urban centres in Kenya.

The company will supplement its WiMAX and fibre offerings with VSAT services for small and medium businesses, particularly in remote locations in East Africa. Its long-term plan is to take fibre to the smallest towns in the region. East Africa Capital Partners’ Richard Bell has admitted that Wananchi is keen to develop a network in South Africa too, but: ‘South Africa is still a very closed and regulated market. East Africa has leapfrogged ahead of South Africa. If we could get a licence to build a cable network in South Africa, we’d be there in a second.’

Mark Schneider, chairman of the Wananchi Group commented: ‘The entertainment market for both home and corporate customers in Africa as a whole continues to be reshaped in light of technological advancements and new industry partnerships. The Wananchi Group's key objective is to expand our portfolio and enhance our commercial proposition, revenues and reputation. Cisco will help us to continuously deliver the necessary technology enhancements to our infrastructure to serve our ever-growing customer needs and remain at the forefront of delivering new and innovative services to our customers.’

Executives at Wananchi and Cisco said that the cost of international bandwidth in the region is now as cheap as it is anywhere in the world - thanks to the recent launches of EASSY, SEACOM and TEAMS submarine cables – making this type of increased investment possible.

SEACOM Cable Fails

SEACOM has confirmed that services between Mumbai and Mombasa have been down since yesterday morning, after a repeater failed. The cable operator has confirmed that the fault will take 'an extended period of time' to fix, possibly as long as eight days.

Most ADSL service providers which use SEACOM bandwidth have already started to re-route international traffic via SAT-3/SAFE. The failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe; traffic within Africa is not affected. ‘SEACOM has initiated emergency repair procedures to replace the repeater. Once mobilised, the repair ship is deployed to the location of the fault to pick up the cable. The cable is then brought on board to undergo the repair — the faulty element is replaced with a new repeater — before being put back in the water,’ an official statement read.

It is not the first time that the SEACOM cable system has experienced connectivity issues in recent months; it suffered a major outage in April. SEACOM is a Mauritian-based company, owned 76.56% by African investors. The remainder is owned by Herakles Telecom, an international development group based in New York City.

Ethiopia Signs Up for SEACOM

Ethiopian fixed line incumbent, Ethiopian Telecommunications Corporation (ETC), has inked a deal with SEACOM for an international backhaul link via Djibouti, Computerworld reports. As a result of the deal ETC expects to lower the cost of bandwidth, and subsequently the cost to consumers for telecoms services. Commenting on the development, Amare Amsalu, ETC’s CEO, said: ‘SEACOM is ideally suited to provide international connectivity that will complement ETC's extensive national initiative to link the country's businesses and end-users with fibre broadband connectivity,’ adding, ‘The availability of high-quality broadband at lower prices will accelerate economic development and educational initiatives that will enhance lives and will also establish Ethiopia as an important commercial centre for Africa and as a regional transit point for other service providers.’

Under the terms of the deal it is understood that ETC will connect its domestic network to an undersea cable system that has been extended to the shores of the Red Sea. SEACOM has partnered with SEA-ME-WE 3, which operates a cable from South East Asia to Europe; TEAM, which has a Kenya to Dubai link; and the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), which has landing points in six countries. Currently ETC provides its voice and data services via expensive satellite connectivity, operated by Hughes International, although it does also have a low capacity bandwidth connection via Port Sudan.

The agreement complements the ongoing Next Generation Network (NGN) project being undertaken by ETC, which aims to enhance and improve the country’s existing telecoms infrastructure nationwide. The USD1.5 billion project encompasses work on both fixed line and wireless networks, as well as the national fibre-optic backbone.

Eassy To reach Kemya by 31st March

According to a report by Reuters, citing Kenyan MP Samuel Poghisio, the government expects the Eastern African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) to land by 21 March. EASSy follows two other cable systems which have landed in Kenya over the last twelve months, SEACOM and TEAMS, and will further boost bandwidth availability and connectivity across the region.

Poghisio said: ‘By 21 March, we should have the cable fully landed here. It has been a long wait so Kenya is obviously excited to be hosting and that is additional capacity for our computers, for media, for development. The challenge is still the uptake of this capacity that is coming to the east African coast.’

Econet Subsidiary Plans Wireless Network

Liquid Telecom, a majority-owned subsidiary of Zimbabwean cellco Econet Wireless, has revealed ambitious plans for building an international and national fibre-optic transmission network. In an interview with BalancingAct, Liquid’s CEO Nic Rudnick listed the company’s aims. These include: building its own links to international submarine fibre-optic cables (with bandwidth allocations on SEACOM and EASSy systems pending); a 7,500km domestic fibre networks linking all major cities; an international fibre network linking to eight other countries (Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique, Zambia and Namibia in a first phase, and a proposed second phase reaching Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo and Malawi); metro fibre networks in Harare and Bulawayo; and proposed metro networks in two other southern African countries. The network infrastructure is being built by Huawei Technologies of China.

Rudnick indicated that most of the traffic on the network would be Econet’s initially, but that third-party traffic could account for the majority in due course. Econet Wireless set up Liquid Telecom in an attempt to achieve lower international transmission rates than those possible via third-party links to South Africa. The cellco’s development plans for Liquid, which currently operates via satellite bandwidth, were put on hold during Zimbabwe’s economic crash.

Econet Wireless Zimbabwe’s internet subsidiary Ecoweb already operates a fibre-optic backbone covering Harare and Bulawayo, whilst the country’s incumbent PSTN operator TelOne is pursuing a project to build a nationwide high speed fibre network, but has faced obstacles raising the necessary funding. Meanwhile the commercial launch of the EASSy consortium international fibre system has suffered delays and is now expected to be operational in August 2010.

Vodacom Cuts Its Broadband Charges

Ermano Quartero, managing executive of Vodacom Business, has announced his firm has implemented a range of broadband price cuts which will see business clients pay, on average, 50% less for broadband usage, BusinessDay reports.

Quartero said that the cut had been made possible by ‘increasing competition between undersea cable providers, which in turn creates a sustainable competitive international bandwidth market in South Africa.’  SEACOM, a 15,000km, 1.28Tbps cable system connecting South Africa with Europe and Asia, launched operations, pledging to reduce bandwidth charges across Africa.

The cable partially liberated the South African market, which had previously relied on a single submarine cable, the Telkom-controlled SAT-3, to provide the bulk of international traffic. On 20 November 2009 SEACOM expressed its disappointment in a lack of take-up in South Africa, stating that incumbent operators would need to take the lead and drop prices to see broadband expansion in the country.

However, Quartero claims that today’s cuts could spur on a spate of price reductions nationwide, saying: ‘This cut is absolutely permanent: the price can never come up, because the pressures are just too extreme.’

Artel Dishes UTL For Rwanda Government Network

State-owned ISP New Artel Rwanda has said that it will now deliver high speed internet access from SEACOM’s fibre-optic cable through the national backbone, local daily The New Times reports. The company had in November planned to land the submarine cable through Uganda Telecom's (UTL’s) Point of Presence (PoP) Rwandatel that month.

However, officials have since discovered that incumbent telco Rwandatel does not have the capability of delivering the 155Mbps capacity. ‘In order to have a more reliable connectivity, the capacity will be delivered through the national fibre-optic backbone by UTL from Gatuna to Kigali,’ commented Francis Karemera, CEO of New Artel.

The Rwanda Development Board (RDB)-ICT expects to deliver the national backbone to the Gatuna border by the end of February to route the data to Kigali. New Artel plans to provide 155Mbps to the Kigali Metropolitan Network to connect government ministries, universities and districts. The network aims to connect 97 government agencies in Kigali and 226 in the districts, linking 36 main nodes nationwide.

Rwandatel Fibre-Optic Line Reaches Kigali By April

The 900km fibre-optic cable of Rwandan fixed line operator Rwandatel is expected to land in the capital Kigali by April this year, local daily New Times reports.

According to the operator’s CTO, Basilio Sadindi, the cable had been slated to land in Kigali by January 2010, but sister telco Uganda Telecom (UTL) has encountered delays in laying the cable from Ugandan capital Kampala to Masaka in the south of the country. According to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms Database, UTL and Rwandatel, which are both subsidiaries of Libyan government investment vehicle LAP Green Networks, contracted Green Future in September 2009 to deliver SEACOM's fibre connection to Uganda and Rwanda.

After a full connection to the submarine cable, Rwandatel's internet subscriber base is expected to increase by 10% in the first year. After signing a contract in August last year, UTL and Rwandatel also agreed to purchase an additional 155Mbps of capacity from the SEACOM submarine cable.

East Africans Await to "Feel" Effects of Seacom

Consumers in East Africa are anxiously waiting for a new high-speed fiber-optic cable to finally be switched on for general public use. The cable is expected to usher in a new era of faster, cheaper internet access. As VOA reports from its Nairobi bureau, the new fiber-optic cable and the planned addition of other cables, are anxiously awaited in the last major region in the world to rely on satellite internet.

For more than a year now potential customers in East Africa have heard of the Seacom cable with a mix of wary caution and hopeful relief. In a country like Kenya, where citizens have been disappointed by undelivered political promises and an undeveloped infrastructure, much of the public took a wait-and-see approach to the reports that high-speed internet would soon be available.

Although the cable is now "live," the public is still awaiting the broadband revolution to reach their computers. Now that the question of "if" has been answered, the question of "when" is still hanging in the air.

According to a regional spokesman for Seacom, Solomon Mahindi, as of the end of last week only three Internet service providers in Kenya could be confirmed to have finished negotiations with Seacom to get connected to the cable.

Managing Director of Internet Services Chris Senanu of Access Kenya, one of the country's major internet service providers, said although his company has finalized access to the cable, it will probably be another two weeks or so before the high-speed fiber optic line will be available to its consumers.

"If during the tests we have some major issues, then obviously we are not going to put it right to the public," Senanu said. "But if it goes well, if we have steady links for a week, then we will put it through."

Seacom's Mahindi said that for most service providers it would likely be another two to three months before access to the cable could be passed on to its clients.

When the cable does come online, some of the promised effects will be more immediate than others.

According to Mahindi, the upfront investment needed for each service provider to hook up to the Seacom cable will mean that the estimated 80 to 90 percent reduction in internet costs the cable offers will not likely be passed on at once to costumers.

"Realistically, these ISPs have to somehow recoup their investment costs and any other infrastructure costs - because it is quite an investment to get in terms of the personnel, in terms of the infrastructure, in terms of the equipment," Mahindi said.

Senanu says that although he expects some of his customers to maintain their current bandwidth and switch to a lower-priced package, he predicts that most will instead choose to keep the same-priced package with the increased speed.

"Some customers are going to prefer to have a price discount, because the economic times here are a bit tough. But most people in Kenya are not buying what they need, they have been buying what they can afford," Senanu adds. "So what you are going to see is that a lot of people maintaining budgets for Internet and just taking up more capacity - two times more, three times more, four times more - in order for them to actually be able to leverage the technology to be able what they need to do."

For many clients, the additional speed will not be readily available soon either. While the undersea cable does offer much greater capacity, local providers will have to build broadband capability within the local loops that bring the service to clients. If a service provider has not upgraded its local infrastructure, its clients will be severely limited in the capacity they can access.

Although depending on the service provider the additional cables will not necessarily increase internet speed greatly beyond what Seacom can provide, experts say the greater significance of the other cables lies in the extra connection stability they will give the region. Until the other cables are operational, any issue with the Seacom cable will cause problems across all of connected East Africa.

For now, though, East Africans are still waiting to see what changes the new high speed cable will bring to their homes and businesses.

For those who have never known anything other than unreliable, very slow Internet connections at often unaffordable rates, the revolution most of the rest of the world has already undergone is still a bit of a mystery.

 

--Voice of America.

Tanzania Starts Laying US$600 million Undersea Cable

Tanzania's efforts to set up a communication system to connect international broadband networks started with the laying of a US$600 million undersea cable in Dar es Salaam on Wednesday.

An official from the Seacom Company, the private firm implementing the project, said that the undersea fibre optic cable has been laid down in the Indian Ocean water of commercial capital Dar es Salaam. The trials for the new communication system have been set for March 2009.

Speaking to reporters in Dar es Salaam, Seacom Tanzania managing director Anna Kahama said the project was expected to be complete by June this year. The new technology, which is alternative to the satellite system, is set to lower telecommunications costs by 95 percent, Kahama said.

"Currently, satellite costs about US$300 per megabyte per second while the use of fibre optic cables will cost US$100 per megabite per second," she said.

This is the first fibre optic cable of its kind in East Africa. The cable will be connected to the fibre optic centres in Mozambique, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt, India and Djibouti.

Four Tanzanians are currently undergoing training in India on how the system works. On returning they will assume the positions of station manager, engineer and cable station technical technicians at a centre in Dar es Salaam.

Seacom will be the system's service provider on the East Coast of Africa, linking Southern and East Africa, Europe and Southern Asia.

The company's construction manager, Chriss Albert, said the technology was now common in most parts of the world - except Africa.

"This is high-performance optical transmission equipment," he said. "It connects customers to inland terrestrial networks and other cable landing stations all over the world."

MTN, Neotel Plan to Build Fibre-Optic Network

South African operators MTN and Neotel have signed a joint agreement to co-build a national long-distance fibre-optic network. The network will cover a distance of 5,000 km, connecting the major centres across South Africa.

The first route of the national fibre network will extend from Gauteng to KwaZulu-Natal, incorporating Pietermaritzburg and Durban. Construction of the first leg is expected to commence in the first week of March 2009 with a completion date scheduled before the Fifa World Cup 2010.

The network will provide both MTN and Neotel with bandwidth capacity to carry more voice and data traffic at higher speeds over greater distances using less power than copper cables. MTN said that its initial network will have a capacity in the Tbps range. The initial route will assist MTN and Neotel to link up with the undersea cables such as Eassy and Seacom currently under construction along the eastern coast of Africa.