Austin Beyadi
Dar Es Salaam — Telecommunications cable to connect Sub-Saharan Africa with the rest of the world by 2011 will make landfalls in Tanzania mid this year, with promises of cheap telecommunications and internet connections.
The connection is Tanzania's second undersea cable after SEACOM, the first undersea connection linking East Africa to the rest of the world.
Seacom's efforts would be complemented by yet another important project, the almost 10,000-kilometre East Africa Submarine (EASSy), the undersea cable which is set to run from Port Sudan in the North to Durban, thus completing the fibre loop surrounding Africa.
EASSy is the most advanced of all the sea cables proposed for the East and Southern African region and it will cost 248 million US dollars (over 300bn/-). Upon the project completion, projected in the last quarter of 2010, it will, for the first time, bring faster and affordable internet to about 250 million people in the region.
With East African Sub Marine cable system becoming available for use in Tanzania next July, the cost of international telecommunications and internet connectivity is expected to drop significantly.
Zantel is the Tanzanian landing partner for EASSy. In all, there are nine EASSy landing stations in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa, with shore-end landings already having occurred in Mozambique and Sudan.
"EASSy is one of the elements of Zantel's cable investment strategy and is a key step towards the process of establishing a fibre ring capability around Africa," says Zantel's Business Development Director Michael Magambo.
He adds that EASSy further increases the robustness of Zantel's international bandwidth offerings and portfolio.
Together with other undersea cables or land based fibre routes, EASSy creates redundant fibre access prospects into East Africa.
Eassy reduces reliance on the existing SAT3/SAFE cable, which has had several recent outages on the West Coast of Africa and it will provide the first opportunity for clients of the SEACOM cable to achieve redundancy along the East Coast of Africa.
It may over time drive SEACOM access prices further down, which will in turn bring down the costs on the other cables and it will further provide real competition for Internet access services for all countries on the East Coast of Africa.
Mr Magambo says increasing connectivity among various cable systems means lower latency -- the time it takes for data to pass through a network and for information to return -- and increasing connectivity means greater opportunities for online collaboration between companies operating across Africa.
EASSy, which is currently under construction along the East African coastline, has 1.4 Tbps system design capacity, coupled with its two fibre-pair configuration.
These give EASSy the highest capacity of all undersea cable systems along the east coast of Africa. The SEACOM cable has a capacity of 1.2Tbps.
Interconnection with other undersea international cable systems will enable traffic on EASSy to seamlessly connect to Europe, North and South America, the Middle East and Asia, thereby enhancing the east coast of Africa's connectivity into the global telecommunications network.
Specifically, the project aims at improving the region's global connectivity, by providing the last link of the high capacity optic fibre submarine cable encircling, and connecting the continent of Africa to the global high capacity optic fibre system, he said.
"The project is aimed at providing infrastructure to increase the inter-regional and global information and communication technology (ICT) connectivity," says Mr Magambo.
"EASSy is routed from South Africa to Sudan, linking the coastal countries of East Africa. An extensive backhaul system linking landlocked countries to the coastal countries has been developed and is at various stages of completion," he said.
Zantel Chief commercial officer Mr Norman Moyo explains that submarine cables have many benefits --superior transmission quality, considerably lesser delays compared to satellite, high transmission capacity, access to the global optical fibre network and lower unit costs than satellite.
He however cautions: "But, activities such as fishing and anchoring, ocean drilling, fish bites and earthquakes constituted some of the commonly known submarine cable hazards". Various initiatives were nevertheless undertaken to protect submarine cables.
They include conducting ocean bed surveys to select the safest undersea routes; burying cable in sand where possible, especially at the shallow end; avoiding heavy shipping lanes when approaching landing points; and selecting safe beaches, bearing in mind that later beach erosion could expose cables.
The designs of the shortest land cable route for maximum security; and, manufacturing cables to exceed the 25-year design life of the cable system are also some of the precaution measures.
Zantel will have two fibre links which will consist of SEACOM and EASY and that this will allow the company to have assurance to its customers in case of breakdowns, says Mr Moyo.
The project, he says, will involve providing a high capacity optic fibre sub-marine cable running the total length of eastern coast of Africa connecting to the rest of the world.
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