| SEACOM | |
|---|---|
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Owners:
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| Key people: Oliver Fortuin Group Chief Executive Officer [2] | |
| Landing points see the landing points section | |
| Total length | 17,000 kilometres (10,563 mi) |
| Design capacity | 12 Tbit/s |
| Currently lit capacity | 4.2 Tbit/s [3] |
| Technology | Fiber optics |
| Date of first use | July 23, 2009 |
| Website | seacom |
SEACOM launched Africa's first broadband submarine cable system along the continent's Southern coasts in 2009. SEACOM is privately owned and operated. [1]
Fibre-optic pairs are provided from Mtunzini to France to a point of presence (PoP) in Marseille, as well as from Tanzania to India into a PoP in Mumbai.
SEACOM has also built an on-net European network, managed and operated by themselves, to deliver transport layer, internet protocol (IP), and multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services to the following cities in Europe:
Through third-party networks in Europe, SEACOM also delivers these services to other locations in Europe not covered in the list of cities above. [4]
The SEACOM cable is deployed with a mixture of double armour cable, single armour cable, special protection cable (with a metallic wrap below the insulator, rather than steel wires), and lightweight cable without armour, used in deep waters. Shallower water cable typically has more protective armour than offshore, deeper cable.
The cable is a loose tube design that determines the amount and relative location along the transmission path of each type of fibre. Multiple fibre types are used in the cable: dispersion-shifted and non-zero dispersion-shifted.
The repeaters are optical amplifier repeaters, using erbium-doped amplifiers. There are over 150 repeaters in the SEACOM system. They are spaced along the cable many tens of kilometres apart with the distance between repeaters varying depending on the segment in the system. Repeater spacing is determined by a variety of factors, including the transmission capacity of the fibres in the cable and the distance between cable landing points.
On 23 July 2009, the 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi) cable began operations, providing the eastern and southern African countries of Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa with high-speed Internet connectivity to Europe and Asia. The cable was officially switched on in simultaneous events held across the region, in Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. [5] [6]
On 4 August 2020, SEACOM announced that it would more than double the capacity on its fibre-optic network by the end of August 2020. The continent's first broadband submarine cable system operator will add 1.7Tbit/s to its network, bringing its total capacity to 3.2Tbit/s along Africa's eastern and Southern coasts. [7]
SEACOM is privately funded, and approximately 75 percent Southeastern and South African-owned. Initial private investment in the SEACOM project was US$375 million: $75 million from the developers, $150 million from private South African investors, and $75 million as a commercial loan from Nedbank (South Africa). The remaining $75 million was provided by Industrial Promotion Services (IPS), which is the industrial and infrastructure arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development. The IPS investment was funded by $15 million in equity, and a total of $60.4 million in debt from the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund and the FMO (Netherlands). [8]
Current ownership structure is as follows: 30 percent IPS, 30 percent Remgro, 15 percent Sanlam, 15 percent Convergence Partners, and 10 percent by Brian Herlihy. [1]
The cable is variously described as a $600 and a $650 million project, and has seen a number of upgrades to landing station infrastructure, national backhaul and increases to carrying capacity, with an increase to 2.6 terabits per second (Tbit/s) in May 2012, [9] and then to 12 Tbit/s in 2014. [10]
The cable landing points are:
SEACOM Partner Network landing points include:
Telecommunications infrastructure in South Africa provides modern and efficient service to urban areas, including cellular and internet services. The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) is the watchdog of the telecommunications in the country.
Telecommunications in Tanzania include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet available in mainland Tanzania and the semiautonomous Zanzibar archipelago.
SAT-3/WASC or South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable is a submarine communications cable linking Portugal and Spain to South Africa, with connections to several West African countries along the route.
The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is an undersea fibre optic cable system connecting countries in Eastern Africa to the rest of the world.
Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) is a 28,000-kilometre-long fibre optic mostly-submarine communications cable that connects the United Kingdom, Japan, India, and many places in between. The cable is operated by Global Cloud Xchange, a subsidiary of RCOM. The system runs from the eastern coast of North America to Japan. Its Europe–Asia segment was the fourth longest cable in the world in 2008.
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. It is intended to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable.
The Internet in Africa is limited by a lower penetration rate when compared to the rest of the world. Measurable parameters such as the number of ISP subscriptions, overall number of hosts, IXP-traffic, and overall available bandwidth are indicators that Africa is far behind the "digital divide". Moreover, Africa itself exhibits an inner digital divide, with most Internet activity and infrastructure concentrated in South Africa, Morocco, Egypt as well as smaller economies like Mauritius and Seychelles. In general, only 24.4% of the African population have access to the Internet, as of 2018. Only 0.4% of the African population has a fixed-broadband subscription. The majority of internet users use it through mobile broadband.
The Internet in South Africa, one of the most technologically resourced countries on the African continent, is expanding. The internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .za is managed and regulated by the .za Domain Name Authority (.ZADNA) and was granted to South Africa by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1990. Over 60% of Internet traffic generated on the African continent originates from South Africa. As of 2020, 41.5 million people were Internet users.
The Main One Cable is a submarine communications cable stretching from Portugal to South Africa with landings along the route in various west African countries. On April 28, 2008, it was announced that Main Street Technologies has awarded a turnkey supply contract for the Main One Cable System to Tyco Telecommunications.
The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is a submarine communications cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa that was constructed by Alcatel-Lucent. The cable consists of four fibre pairs and is 14,530 km in length, linking from Yzerfontein in the Western Cape of South Africa to London in the United Kingdom. It has 14 landing points, 12 along the western coast of Africa and 2 in Europe completed on land by a cable termination station in London. The total cost for the cable system is $650 million. WACS was originally known as the Africa West Coast Cable (AWCC) and was planned to branch to South America but this was dropped and the system eventually became the West African Cable System.
Broadband is a term normally considered to be synonymous with a high-speed connection to the internet. Suitability for certain applications, or technically a certain quality of service, is often assumed. For instance, low round trip delay would normally be assumed to be well under 150ms and suitable for Voice over IP, online gaming, financial trading especially arbitrage, virtual private networks and other latency-sensitive applications. This would rule out satellite Internet as inherently high-latency. In some applications, utility-grade reliability or security are often also assumed or defined as requirements. There is no single definition of broadband and official plans may refer to any or none of these criteria.
SAex is a proposed submarine communications cable linking South Africa to the United States with branches to Namibia, Saint Helena, and Brazil.
Equiano is a private transatlantic communications cable that connects western Europe (Portugal) with southern Africa. Branching points along the way connect to Togo, Nigeria, the island of St. Helena and Namibia.
The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) is a submarine communications cable providing a direct trunk connection between Barka and Penang (Malaysia) with four branches to Fujairah (UAE), Mumbai (India), Colombo and Chennai (India). The project was carried out by a consortium that includes Vodafone, Omantel, Etisalat, AT&T, China Telecom, Telstra, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Dialog and Telekom Malaysia. Construction was started in May 2013 and was completed by the end of 2014. From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore. The length of the submarine Cable system is 5,934 kilometres (3,687 mi) from Barka to Penang, with a 216 km (134 mi) branch to Fujairah, 426 km (265 mi) branch to Mumbai, 142 km (88 mi) branch to Colombo and a 1,322 km (821 mi) branch to Chennai, totalling a total length of 8,040 km (5,000 mi).
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 5 is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore and France.
West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) operates as a wholesaler, providing capacity to international telecoms, cloud operators, content providers and internet service providers within and out of Africa. WIOCC offers carriers connectivity to over 550 locations across 30 African countries – utilising more than 75,000 km (47,000 mi) of terrestrial fibre and 200,000 km (120,000 mi) of submarine fibre-optic cable. WIOCC's international network reach currently extends to 100 cities in 29 countries in Europe and more than 700 cities in 70 countries globally.
The BRICS Cable is a planned optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between the BRICS countries, specifically Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The cable was announced in 2012 but was still under construction as of 2015. The project aims to provide bandwidth around the Southern Hemisphere of the globe and to "ensure that developing nations’ communications are not all in the hands of the nations of the North".
MAREA is a 6,605 km long transatlantic communications cable connecting the United States with Spain. Owned and funded by Microsoft and Meta Platforms, but constructed and operated by Telxius, a subsidiary of the Spanish telecom company Telefónica, it is the "highest-capacity submarine cable in the world" with a system design capacity of 200 terabits per second as of 2019.
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 6 is an in-progress optical fibre submarine communications cable system that would carry telecommunications between Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Construction began in early 2022. It is expected to be operational in the first quarter of 2025 The expected cable length is 19,200 km and it has a design capacity of 126 Tbit/s, using SDM technology.
PEACE Cable, which stands for Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe, is a submarine cable project designed to facilitate data transmission between Asia, Europe, and Africa. It is owned by Peace Cable International, a subsidiary of Hengtong Group. The 15,000 km cable system is deployed along the seafloor of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, with plans to extend the cable length to 25,000 km. It is based on WSS ROADM technology with a design capacity of 24 Tbit/s per fiber pair. The cable entered service and became fully operational in December 2022.
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