Bandwidth for Africa

I had a fascinating discussion with WIOCC who are a major shareholder in the EASSy submarine cable. The cable is due for commissioning June next year (approximately a year after the SEACOM cable).

EASSy, like SEACOM, has multiple landing points along the eastern coast, from South Africa to Sudan. Thereafter the cable connects onwards to Europe, the Middle East and the USA.

What impressed me with EASSy is that the network is configured as a two fibre pair collapsed ring. Normally a cable cut between nodes would split the network into two. This wouldn't happen with a collapsed ring architecture as only one would be pruned from the network in the case of a cable cut in shallow water (as the ring integrity is built into the deepwater cables). A deepwater cut would still result into a network split but this is unavoidable as a true ring architecture is not possible due to coastline geography.

It will be interesting to see what effect price competition and regulation will have on end-user consumption. Multiple submarine cables will directly impact wholesale pricing, but consumer pricing will be dependent on the backhaul and “last mile” infrastructure and solutions. The most promising "last mile" solutions are HSDPA and WiMAX. I use WiMAX with great success as it provides an experience very similar to ADSL (ADSL is not available in the area that I live due to lack of available cable).

As WIOCC state in their marketing literature … “Businesses and consumers in east and southern Africa are about to experience a revolution”.