25 July 2011
Undersea data cable company Seacom has invested R100-million in additional infrastructure in South Africa in an effort 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, as well as installing equipment required for Seacom to manage the network linking the Seacom landing point on the KwaZulu-Natal coast to two redundant points-of-presence (PoPs) in Gauteng province.
“South Africa continues to offer tremendous growth opportunities and this investment confirms Seacom’s view that adequate infrastructure will ensure that the market can absorb new capacity within record time,” Seacom CEO Brian Herlihy said in a statement this week.
Interconnected African markets
The fibre will be lit with modern technology that will give the new link a design capacity of over 8 terabits per second (T/bs), in line with Seacom’s plans to expand the marine portion of the cable to over 4.8 Tb/s.
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, HD video streaming and IPTV services.
“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.
The improvements go toward supporting the company’s vision of an African internet experience characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets.
Internet Protocol platform
The investment also supports Seacom’s recently launched Internet Protocol (IP) platform that will drive the proliferation of content created in Africa and the regional hosting of international content.
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 Seacom’s existing routes and will provide customers with the benefit of protected services delivered across multiple, physically diverse routes and operated by multiple providers.
“This new capacity will benefit the end user by enabling SEACOM clients to bring new content rich products to market in a reliable and economical way,” said Seacom head of product strategy, Suveer Ramdhani.
“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.”
SAinfo reporter
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