TEAMS (cable system)

Last updated
TEAMS
(The East African Marine System)
Owners:
Government of Kenya; Etisalat; private investors
Landing points
Total length4,500 km
Topologyunknown
Design capacity40 Gb/s (upgradeable to 640 Gb/s)
Currently lit capacityn/a
TechnologyFiber optics
Date of first useApril 2009;15 years ago (April 2009)

TEAMS (The East African Marine System) is an initiative spearheaded by the government of Kenya to link the country to the rest of the world through a submarine fibre optic cable. It was first proposed as an alternative to EASSy, the East African Submarine Cable System. The Kenyan government had grown frustrated with the ownership model favoured by South Africa, the time it was taking and what it perceived as an attempt by South Africa to control the cable. As a result, in November 2006, the Kenyan government decided to partner with the Emirates Telecommunication Establishment (Etisalat) to build its own fibre optic cable.

Contents

Although the Kenyan government has decided to pursue their own fibre optic cable, they are still committed to EASSy.

History

Five companies — Alcatel-Lucent, Tyco Telecommunication, Fujitsu Corporation, NEC Corporation and Huawei Technologies — had placed their bids for the building of the TEAMs undersea cable.

On October 11, 2007, Alcatel-Lucent were awarded the $79 million contract to lay the cable. Construction began in January 2008 on the Emirates' side.

On 12 June 2009 the cable arrived in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa and was launched by the President of Kenya Mwai Kibaki, the Prime Minister of Kenya Raila Odinga and other dignitaries.

On 25 February 2012 the TEAMS cable was accidentally cut by a dredging ship carrying some works for the Kenya Ports Authority at Mombasa Offshore. [1] The repairs took about 4 weeks, because of multiple cable cuts between North Sudan and Egypt about the same time. [2] More than half of the networks in Kenya and Uganda were affected. [3] The impact of the break was made worse because TEAMS was itself carrying re-routed EASSy traffic after three cables experienced breaks in the Red Sea on February 17 - Europe India Gateway, SEA-ME-WE 3, and the EASSy. [4]

On 27 April 2012 the TEAMS cable suffered another blow, attributed to the same dredging activities at Mombasa. [5]

Path

The 5,000 km fibre optic cable links the city of Mombasa on the coast of Kenya to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates.

Capacity

The TEAMS cable was originally designed to have an initial capacity of 80  Gb/s upgradable to 640 Gbit/s should the initial capacity be insufficient. During the implementation of the project, the designed capacity of the system was increased to 1.2 Tb/s and the initial capacity to 120 Gbit/s. Unexpected sharp rise in the demand for international bandwidth is expected to push the parties to the drawing board to consider upgrading the cable system earlier than originally planned. Kenya and the East African countries are increasingly pushing more traffic via the TEAMS cable, because of the perceived better transmission quality (very low latency) and reliability of the system.

Ownership

Ownership of the cable is as follows:

TEAMS (Kenya) Ltd consists of:

See also

Sources

Related Research Articles

Telecommunications in Kenya include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.

In the Seychelles, local and international telecommunications lines are operated by Cable & Wireless. In 1997 there were around 11,000 telephone lines and in excess of 20,000 telephones, meaning that over half of the population have a home telephone.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SAT-3/WASC</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SEA-ME-WE 4</span> Submarine communications cable system

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alcatel-Lucent</span> French global telecommunications equipment company

Alcatel–Lucent S.A. was a multinational telecommunications equipment company, headquartered in Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris France. It was formed in 2006 by the merger of France-based Alcatel SA and U.S.-based Lucent Technologies, the latter being a successor of AT&T's Western Electric and a holding company of Bell Labs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet in Africa</span> Internet access and usage in Africa

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, and Egypt, as well as smaller economies like Mauritius and the Seychelles. In general, only 43% of the African population has access to the Internet as of 2021. Only 0.4% of the African population has a fixed-broadband subscription. The majority of internet users use it through mobile broadband.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Internet in South Africa</span>

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SEACOM (African cable system)</span> African submarine communications cable

SEACOM launched Africa's first broadband submarine cable system along the continent's Southern coasts in 2009. SEACOM is privately owned and operated.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Greenland Connect</span> Submarine communications cable system connecting Canada, Greenland, and Iceland

Greenland Connect is a submarine communications cable system that connects Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. The cable contains two fibre pairs specified for 128*10 Gbit/s wavelength each. Initial lit capacity is 1*10 Gbit/s for each fibre pair. Two additional 10 Gbit/s Wavelength were installed in the summer of 2010. The cable has cable landing points at:

Europe India Gateway (EIG) is a submarine communications cable system that connects the U.K., Portugal, Gibraltar, Monaco, France, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West Africa Cable System</span> Submarine communications cable linking Africa with the United Kingdom

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National broadband plan</span> National plans to deploy broadband Internet access

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.

Honotua is a submarine communications cable system that connects several islands of French Polynesia via Tahiti to Hawaii. The cable was laid by the cableship Île de Ré (câblier) between December 2009 and June 2010.

SAex is a proposed submarine communications cable linking South Africa to the United States with branches to Namibia, Saint Helena, and Brazil.

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 was a planned optical fibre submarine communications cable system that would have carried telecommunications between the BRICS countries, specifically Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. The cable was announced in 2012 but the project was abandoned around 2015. The project aimed 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".

Africa-1 is a 10,000 km long international submarine telecommunications cable system from France to the Middle East, through Africa.

References

  1. ↑ "Anchor cuts East Africa web cable". BBC News. 2012-02-28. Retrieved 2018-08-13.
  2. ↑ "Cable Cuts: Who's up, who's down? | CIO East Africa - Business Technology Leadership". Archived from the original on 2012-03-01. Retrieved 2012-02-29.
  3. ↑ "East African Internet Resilience | Dyn Blog" . Retrieved 2018-08-13.
  4. ↑ "Ship Accidents Sever Data Cables Off East Africa". 2012-02-28. Retrieved 2012-04-10.
  5. ↑ "TEAMS cut again. Another month of slow speeds? - CIO East Africa". Archived from the original on 2012-04-30. Retrieved 2012-05-11.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.