Tuesday, August 3, 2010

East Africa's EASSy Submarine Cable Offer 1.4 Tbps Capacity

E-Marine was awarded a maintenance and storage agreement with the East African Submarine System (EASSy), a fiber-optic cable that will serve twenty-one African nations. E-marine will now take responsibility for maintaining up to an 8,600km-strech of the EASSy submarine cable network. It will also provide secure storage for supplies and accessories in its Bonded Cable Depot in the Port of Salalah, Oman.


E-Marine owns three Cable Ships and One Special Purpose Cable laying support vessel.
http://www.emarine.aehttp://www.eassy.org

  • As of 19-July-2010, all the Eassy landing stations have been completed, tested and are fully operational. Construction of the 1.4 Tbps, 10,000km submarine cable project was completed on time and on budget, according to the WIOCC, the specially-created investment company owned by 14 African telcos, although planning for the project had begun before the SEACOM cable was envisioned and deployed.


  • The nine landing countries for the EASSy cable are: South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Comores, Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, Djibouti and Sudan.


  • EASSy Consortium Members include Bharti Airtel (India), Botswana Telecom, BT (UK), Comores Telecom (Union of Comoros), Etisalat (United Arab Emirates), France Telecom, Mauritius Telecom, MTN International Group (India), Neotel (South Africa), Saudi Telecom, Sudatel (Sudan), TTCL (Tanzania), Telkom South Africa/Vodacom (South Africa), Telma (Madagascar), and Zambia Telecom.


  • Alcatel-Lucent was the lead supplier for the EASSy project
  • In July 2010, Main One Cable has activated commercial service on its new 7,000 km undersea cable connecting West Africa to Europe. The terabit capacity cable has landing stations in Nigeria and Ghana and branching units in Morocco, Canary Islands, Senegal and Ivory Coast. The company, which is wholly African, calculates that its cable offer more than ten times the bandwidth of what was previously available. Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications (SubCom) was the lead contractor on the Main One project.
  • In July 2009, SEACOM's 17,000 km, submarine fiber optic cable system entered into commercial service, linking south and east Africa to global networks via India and Europe with 1.28 Terabit per second (Tbps) of capacity. Backhauls linking Johannesburg, Nairobi and Kampala with the coastal landing stations have been established and SEACOM is also working with its national partners to commission the final links to Kigali and Addis Ababa shortly. The entire system will be operated and controlled through SEACOM's Network Operations Centre which is based in Pune, India. The SEACOM system was designed and installed by Tyco Telecommunications.
  • In July 2010, a fault with a undersea repeater system on the Seacom cable disrupted Internet traffic in east Africa for three weeks.