Touching the internet, well the Seacom cable that runs from France all the way down the East Coast of Africa into Durban, was a highlight of yesterday’s media launch that I was invited to attend.
It was a really early morning flight up to Durban with Charl Norman, David Perel, Dee Chetty and Minnaar Pieters. We had a press conference at the Boathouse in Ballito with Brian Herlihy, the CEO of Seacom telling us the hurdles that they had to face as well as what the future will offer us, now that Seacom has landed.
Some of the more interesting points was how they had to not only worry about relations and clearance certificates from all the countries they landed the cable at, but also be aware of sea-faring pirates!
South Africa does not know what true broadband is. Brian’s flat in New York is a perfect example of how the internet and broadband has evolved.
- 3 service providers – television, telephone and internet
- 50 odd television channels
- 56k dialup internet
- paid for telephone service
Now, with true broadband, Brian’s flat offers him the following:
- 1 service provider for television, telephone and internet
- 50mb/s true broadband internet
- 1000 television channels with 350 of those channels being HD
- Free telephone service
After the press conference, we headed off to the landing station where they gave us a tour of how everything comes together. The 2 pictures below are of the fibre-optic cable that runs all the way up the East Coast of Africa into France. That’s pretty much where “THE INTERNET” in SA will come from. Scary to see how thin that cable is.
How is Seacom going to affect me as an end-user?
Sadly, the only affect this cable is going to have in the near future in SA is the price of an internet connection will drop. The problem SA has is that we already have an existing and old telecommunications infrastructure owned by Telkom.
ADSL in SA will never get faster than 4MB/s. WiMax is not feasible as you need to setup towers around the country to facilitate mobile internet and with you needing 56 towers in Sandton alone as an example, there just isn’t enough available land. Cellular telecoms providers Vodacom and MTN do offer internet connections that reach a max speed of 7.2MB/s, but as well all know these speeds are often not achievable, given the nature of mobile internet connectivity.
In my opinion, SA will not see true broadband speeds of over 20mb/s for another 5-10 years given the current infrastructure and costs involved to setup a true broadband service in our country. For now, at least we can put pressure on our service providers to lower costs and offer us more bandwidth than the stale 384kb/s + 3GB monthly connection.
Final Thoughts
It was a real eye-opener to see how a country, being South Africa, will now be getting data to and from the rest of the world and after yesterday, not many people can actually say, “I touched the internet”.
Jason Bagley, reporting for Tech Start News.
“ADSL in SA will never get faster than 4MB/s” – isn’t Telkom looking at ADSL2 at this very moment? Or doesn’t that count as ADSL?
One other thing: the argument up to know was that high bandwidth costs are related to specifically high international bandwidth costs.
Doesn’t Seacom imply a vast increase of supply/availability of international bandwidth (and a drastic reduction in price)? The problem hasn’t been the local (old and existing) infrastructure – the issue has always been the cost of international bandwidth, and the (other) cable that Telkom has been monopolising..
@alan, ADSL2 goes up to 8MB, once again, not true broadband and not sure if this is something that is being rolled out or how long it will ever take to be rolled out. Copper telephone cables can only handle so much – thus the reason I say we have an old infrastructure.
Yes, Seacom does increase the supply of international bandwidth, thus my reasoning for saying the price our our internet connections will decrease – its the speed however that our current networks cannot handle. That cable pumps data to us at 1.3 Terabytes a second, whereas our current Sat3 cable is dying a slow death at 130 gigabytes a second. The problem being our grid cannot handle that speed, so in essence our infrastructure is throttling the possibility of SA having true broadband speeds on par with the US, Europe and the East.
We wont see much of a decrease in speak as Seacom will simply make their price slightly lower than SAIX (telkom) in order to maximize profits.
Do you really think they will lower the price unnecessarily?
when will we be able to start using this net??? they keep showing but nothing dated???
Yo! Well i for one play online games. WoW is the better one of all. The speed we had within South Africa was never the problem..It has always been the speed From the WoW server to South Africa that made things not so cool when it comes to lag. From Telkom to my home although not true broadband it was fast enough to handle all the data i needed for a smooth gaming experience. I always had huge latency problems when the international connection or server at Telkom gave them trouble and they even gave me a Proxy server address i can use in case it does. This server fixed my lag when i used it. Now what i care about is the speed and reliability of the international connection and not really what we have in South Africa. So if i get this right the international data speed Telkom or Neotel receives might change a lot in the future although not true broadband i think it will increase drastically and make my internet gaming experience so much faster so i will be able to compete in some areas of the game where i need the better latency to move forward. Well just tell me if i’m dreaming a dream that won’t come true. If yes then Damn! I have been looking forward to nothing. What was the use of the seacom cable then?
And what about neotel whats happening with them.
im happy with the speeds im on vodacom hsdpa. how about something like 2gig for 189rand and 4gig for 289rand and etc
the problem with south africans they want to get rich in 1month and the big companies are succeeding with that
Broadband internet these days are getting much faster and cheaper too. `’*
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