The construction of WIOCC’s East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is complete; promises affordable international bandwidth pricing

The West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) yesterday announced that the construction of the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is complete.

“The joining of the two segments making up WIOCC’s EASSy cable – the so-called `final splice’ – took place a few days ahead of schedule at 0040hrs on Monday morning. The installation phase of the project, which started in Maputo, Mozambique in December 2009, was completed on board the cable laying vessel Ile de Batz in the Indian Ocean just off the east African coast,” the WIOCC said in an official statement.

Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC said: “Now that this critical stage of the project has been completed successfully and ahead of time, we will start system testing almost immediately. Once this is finalised, we are looking forward to connecting our first customers to the network from July 2010.”

“A key difference between EASSy and other sub-Saharan systems is that our system will deliver connectivity to Europe via a direct route through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea,” said WIOCC’s CTO Ryan Sher, chairman of EASSy’s Technical Working Group.

“EASSy will be the first east coast system to connect directly to Europe, minimising the time taken for traffic from Africa to reach the key internet peering points in Europe and North America, and vice-versa,” said Sher.

Affordable pricing

According to WIOCC EASSy’s affordable pricing and open access structure promises to revolutionise many African markets.

“At WIOCC, we are offering connectivity from as little as 2Mbps (Megabits per second) for one month, up to multiple Gbps (Gigabits per second) wavelengths for the lifetime of the system, and thereby levelling the playing field for small, medium and large organizations,” said James Wekesa, WIOCC’s Chief Commercial Officer.

Redundancy and reliability

The WIOCC said in a blog post today that the recent outage on the Sea-Me-We 4 cable being used by Seacom to route its connections to Europe reinforces the need for service providers to have capacity on multiple systems to ensure continuity in delivery of their international traffic.

“WIOCC’s EASSy cable has been designed with resilience in mind right from the start. It is the only one in the region based on a `collapsed ring’ design end-to-end, enabling traffic to be rerouted the opposite way around the ring, minimising the impact of cable cuts and many of the more common equipment failures,” said the WIOCC.

“Our terrestrial backhaul networks provide alternative routes between landing stations, and the connectivity agreements we are putting in place with a variety of global service providers ensure further protection for international traffic.”
http://mybroadband.co.za/news/telecoms/12145-EASSy-take-Seacom-Sat–soon.html

Gateway Communications has increased its presence in West Africa, having signed two deals in Guinea, expanding its work with Intercel and agreeing a new contract with ETI SA.

Gateway is now working with two major mobile operators and an ISP in Guinea, a country with a mobile penetration of 21,43% and five mobile phones for every landline.

Gateway also has established carrier customers in Senegal, as well as Benin, Chad, Niger and Ivory Coast.

In 2009 Gateway Communications upgraded its agreement with Intercel Guinea to provide inbound and outbound voice and cellular backhaul services.

This was the logical choice for Intercel Guinea, says CEO Djibril Tobe. “We required a solution that would efficiently address our international voice requirements as well as deliver a swift return on investment. A key part of this was engaging a provider with a depth of technical expertise that could provide the support we’ve come to know and trust throughout our long-term relationship with Gateway.”
Intercel is Guinea’s major telecoms provider and Gateway supplies all of its international connectivity and critical backhaul services. Throughout this six-year partnership with Intercel Guinea, Gateway has built a national backbone of cellular links, connecting five major cities via cellular backhaul including Kankan, Labé, Mamou and Nzékoré.

During this time Gateway also partnered with ETI SA for use of their earth station equipment and providing satellite capacity. ETI SA, Guinea’s leading Internet service provider operates out of Conakry and currently focuses on business customers with a view to moving into the consumer market in the future. Gateway provides internet capacity from Conakry to Europe and delivered and implemented its pure SCPC connection via satellite in less than 10 days.

Unlike Winston the carrier pigeon who famously beat a transmitted data capsule from Pietermaritzburg to Durban, Formula One ace Lewis Hamilton was pipped at the post in a similar race against Vodacom Business’ Metro E network yesterday.

As part of the challenge, Lewis raced around the 4,2km Kyalami Race Track in Johannesburg against a data capsule of 5,4Gb of data transmitted across Vodacom Business’ super-fast, high-capacity Metro Ethernet fibre network from Midrand to Sandton.

On the third non-standing race lap, Lewis’ time of 2.0 minutes exactly matched that of the data capsule. However with his first-lap time of 2.11 minutes and a second lap of 2.09 minutes, Metro E just managed to take the overall race on average lap times.

The 5,4Gb of data was enough to contain about five full-length movies of about 1Gb each. Lewis, as part of the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes F1 team, was competing against Metro E in a Mercedes-Benz AMG C63, which has a top speed of 250km/h.

Hamilton said about the race: “This was a unique challenge – I’m used to racing against a person and not technology. The moment I got into my car I knew that the speed at which the information travels would be very hard to beat – however that was the challenge.”

Ermano Quartero, managing executive of products and services at Vodacom Business, says the day was all about high technology, high speed, high performance and high reliability, and celebrated a milestone for Vodacom Business and South African enterprises.

“Metro E provides the capacity and speed to fulfill all big business’ mission-critical and time-sensitive connectivity needs – reliably and cost-effectively,” he says. “With Metro E, businesses have access to a super-fast, high capacity fibre connection, giving them greater control over what they send and how they connect and communicate.”
Will Lewis be back for a repeat performance?

“I love it in South Africa. I’ve received an incredible reception from its people – and I really didn’t have a full idea of the following I have here. It’s been a great experience and I really enjoyed racing on the Kyalami race track,” he says

http://www.it-online.co.za/content/view/2054165/142/