COMMUNICATIONS:CONFIRMATION LAST week that the critical portions of the new Seacom undersea fibre-optic cable linking Africa to Europe and India had been completed was hailed as the start of the continent's broadband revolution.
Large swathes of Africa have been left to languish in the connectivity dark ages over the past decade. Even South Africa, the continent’s leading and most-competitive economy, has been reduced to wishing for the high-speed broadband capacity that other less developed countries take for granted.
While the ability of African businesses to compete is an obvious casualty of the lack of broadband capacity, education and scientific research have also been stunted by the poor connectivity.
Arthur Goldstuck, managing director of Johannesburg-based World Wide Worx, says the cable is seen as the first of a series of major connectivity interventions in Africa.
The final result will be a rewriting of the telecommunications history of Africa, he said in his company’s recently-published information and communications (ICT) industry study on internet access in South Africa.
Goldstuck told The Irish Timesthe lack of submarine infrastructure to facilitate the growing demand from southern and eastern Africa for competitively-priced broadband has kept the telecommunications industry on the back foot. While west and north African countries have been able to tap into underwater cables that originate in South America and Europe to handle their increasing internet traffic, the south and east has had to remain reliant on the Sat3/Safe cables, two lines that meet in South Africa.
The 7,000km stretch of coastline from the small coastal town of Mtunzini on South Africa’s eastern coast, near Durban, to Djibouti on the Horn of Africa remained the longest coastline in the world without high-capacity underwater cable. The Sat3 (the South Atlantic Telecommunications/West African Submarine cable), which has a capacity of 120 Gigabits per second (Gb/s), was constructed in 1993 by an international consortium led by SA Telkom. The line runs beneath the sea from Spain down the west coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, where it lands in South Africa’s Western Cape province.
Here it links to the 130 Gb/s Safe cable (South Africa Far East cable), which continues into the Indian Ocean linking South Africa to India and Malaysia.
Most of South Africa’s internet traffic travels out of the country on these lines, but the costs were kept high by cable managers Telkom, a semi-state company based in South Africa that had been allowed to monopolise the marketplace.
To justify the high prices, says Goldstuck, Telkom limited connectivity to a mere 40 Gb/s until last year, even though the combined cables could have been upgraded to a maximum capacity of 250 Gb/s.
Under South Africa’s Telecommunications Act of 1996, Telkom was given a monopoly from 1997 to 2002, when it was intended that a second operator would gain access.
But this entry was delayed for another five years, and it was only with the introduction of the internet service provider Neotel in 2007 that some sort competition arrived. It was allowed access to Sat3/Safe last year and commissioned Seacom.
Until then Telkom charged what it liked for the limited internet access. The company even went to the courts to stop competition, said Goldstuck. South Africa ended up with the world’s highest charges for broadband internet access.
However, Telkom’s policies may have backfired. The high prices and limited access encouraged other telcos to build their own cables.
After Seacom’s 13,700km-long underwater cable, there are plans for at least seven other cables. In the next three years t a series of new cables will connect Africa.
Seacom, which cost an estimated $650 million (€450 million) to construct, boasts 1.2 terabits per second (Tbps) capacity – five times that of the Sat3/Safe cable. The first customers in South Africa to benefit from its broadband capacity, the country’s universities, will pay 1 per cent of the Telkom charge.
Seacom is a joint venture between African and American telecos.
Speaking from his New York office, Seacoms chief executive Brian Herlihy shed some light on the challenges laying a line from London to South Africa.
“To construct Seacom we had to navigate our way through 11 different districts, which means we had to adhere to do 11 environmental impact assessments, seek the same number of permits and comply with the different tax regimes. So you can imagine the logistics involved, especially considering the timeframe. Delays are expensive: if you don’t have a beach permit you need you have to wait until you get it, but hiring the vessels needed to lay the cable costs $75,000 per day so you dont want them waiting, he said.
“We had to lay a huge amount of cable along ocean floor around the Horn of Africa near Somalia, which makes you a target for pirates, especially as the ships we use move very slowly. Our vessels that travelled to and from the work site had to do so in a navy convoy, while we had to hire gunships to protect our vessels as they worked, which was not cheap,” said Herlihy.
The result of all this effort: in South Africa, the cost of broadband will drop by 75 percent over the next three years.
