SEACOM and Tyco Telecommunications Begin Construction of African Submarine Cable System

Sea Technology, Feb 2008

SEACOM Ltd. (New York, New York) and its supplier, Tyco Telecommunications (Morristown, New Jersey), recently announced that they have commenced construction of the 15,000-kilometer SEACOM submarine cable system for southern and eastern Africa.

SEACOM will have 1.28 terabits per second of capacity and will run from Mtunzini, near Durban in South Africa, to Mumbai, India, and Marseille, France, via Mozambique, Madagascar, Kenya and Tanzania. The project is expected to be completed by June 2009, ensuring that the southern and eastern African regions will have increased network bandwidth when South Africa hosts the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Confederations Cup in 2009 and the FIFA World Cup in 2010, said representatives.

SEACOM, a privately funded submarine fiber optic cable system, will complement communication carriers of southem and eastern Africa through the sale of wholesale international capacity to global networks eastward through India and westward through the Mediterranean.

SEACOM will have twice the capacity of the sole existing cable in the region, enabling greater availability and lower cost for high-demand services such as high-definition television, peer-to-peer networks and the Internet, representatives said.

"The overwhelming demand for increased bandwidth in east and south Africa grows greater each day," explains Brian Herlihy, president of SEACOM. "SEACOM is making massive new bandwidth available, enabling prices to come down dramatically and opening up the possibility of developing new fields of economic activity in all the countries served."