A couple weeks ago, I was invited to attend a SEACOM conference in Durban, which I, unfortunately, wasn’t able to attend. However, I’ve been keeping up to date with things and felt I should give you all a bit of an idea.

SEACOM is link between South Africa, Mozambique and a host of other African countries to the global internet. It will carry data to and from our local networks within our borders and drag it undersea, along the east coast of Africa and into the mass of Cyberspace that sits internationally.

SEACOM is NOT an ISP. SEACOM will not provide consumer targeted products and will never be in business of connecting homes, offices, etc to the internet. Instead, it is a B2B company that will sell its products to companies that will onsell bandwidth to consumers. So, the Vodacoms, MTNs, ISs, Telkoms and Neotels and other ISPs will be the customers to SEACOM. Mostly those companies with local network infrastructure that can plug into SEACOM’s international line.

So what is the benefit to the consumer?

Previously, all our international bandwidth used to be transported over another international cable, which had the data capacity of about 130Gbs. SEACOM will provide an alternate cable to these ISPs which have the capacity to carry about 10 times the amount of data per second as our current provider does, at a speed of 1.28Tbs (thats a lot!).

So with this additional competition, ISPs will have the freedom of choice, instead of being tied into a monopoly. Competition will therefore affect pricing and we will see a drop in price as more and more ISPs begin to shift over to SEACOM, creating a competitive market to supply bandwidth to ISPs.

Big thanks to DChetty for providing this information, there’s a ton more on his site if you want to read further!