SA fibre purchase to support exponential growth in bandwidth consumption and improve quality of service
Seacom has invested R100mn in additional South African infrastructure 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 (DFA) as well as installing the equipment required for Seacom to manage the network linking KwaZulu Natal’s coast where the Seacom marine cable lands to two redundant Points of Presence (PoPs) in Gauteng.
Initially, 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) of the fibre is being lit (using current 10 Gb/s technology) - with a further 20 waves are expected to be lit through to summer 2012. Ultra-modern transmission technology is being used with 100 Gb/s per wavelength which gives the new link a design capacity of over 8 Terabit per second (Tb/s). This is in line with Seacom’s plans to expand the marine portion of the cable to over 4.8 Tb/s.
Customer needs
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. This 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.
Brian Herlihy, SeacomCEO, said, “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. 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.“
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.
Suveer Ramdhani, Seacom’s Head of Product Strategy, said, “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. 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.”
