New undersea cable lands in South Africa - internet costs to fall

Feb 12, 2010, 20:10 GMT

Johannesburg - Another undersea fibre-optic cable running along the coast of east Africa was expected to reach South Africa over the weekend, in a development expected to hike internet speeds and sink costs in Africa's biggest economy.

Telecommunications provider Telkom, the landing partner for the cable in South Africa, said in a statement that the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) would land in northern KwaZulu-Natal province, on the south-east tip of the continent.

The 10,000-kilometre cable has already come ashore in Sudan at its northern tip, and Mozambique.

Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros and Madagascar are also lined up to receive the cable, while will also service landlocked countries through hook-ups.

EASSy has a capacity of 1.4 terabits per second, higher than any other undersea cable system servicing East Africa, Telkom said.

Undersea cables have been welcomed as a cheaper in the area of broadband internet to satellite technology.

In July last year, Seacom, a majority African-owned company, went live with the first such East Africa cable, linking southern, east and north Africa to India and Europe along a 17,000-kilometre route.

Internet costs are expected to fall and connection speeds to improve as internet providers hitch up to the new cables.

Last year, Telkom suffered the embarrassment of seeing its 'high-speed' ADSL line beaten by an 11-month-old homing pigeon on the delivery of four gigabytes of data over 85 kilometres.

'Ultimately, we believe that EASSy will also go a long way towards increasing Africa's bandwidth capacity, affordability and create increased diversity and fibre redundancy between SA and Europe as well as within East Africa,' Alphonzo Samuels, Telkom's Wholesale Services manager said.

Telkom says it also had stakes in a number of undersea cables, excluding Seacom.

EASSy is not actually expected to go live in South Africa until August - after the football World Cup.

According to the Internet World Stats website, internet penetration is only 5.6 per cent in Africa, compared to 26.6 per cent in the rest of the world.