The next undersea cable planning to steal our hearts is the East African Submarine Cable System. The project is expected to be completed by the end of June 2010.  EASSy is well under way with 40% of the cable construction already been completed.

EASSy is a consortium of 27 operators building an open access international fibre-optic submarine cable, comprising Botswana Telecommunications Corporation, Bharti, BT, Comoros Telecom, Etisalat, Neotel South Africa, France Telecom, Mauritius Telecom, MTN International, Saudi Telecom, and Sudan Telecom.

Similar to Seacom, EASSy will travel along the East cost of Africa with 9 cable landing stations, namely, Port Sudan, Djibouti, Mogadishu, Mombasa, Dar es Salaam, Moroni (in Comoros), Toliary (in Madagascar), Maputo, and Mtunzini (where Seacom will also be landing).

At first glance, EASSy will only be connecting African countries together. What many of you may not know is that EASSy will also connect to the Europe India Gateway Submarine Cable System. The EIG will stretch from the UK to France, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Monaco, Libya, Egypt, Djibouti, the United Arab Emirates and, of course, India.

The cable’s purpose is to provide a central linking point for other cable systems already in the pipeline, such as Eassy and the West African Cable System (WACS). EIG will be the first direct, high bandwidth, fibre optic cable connecting United Kingdom to India. EIG will have a capacity of 3.84 terabits per second and has upgradeable transmission facilities to provide for future bandwidth growth.

All this bandwidth would be useless without a terrestrial network connecting the cables to actual end users and businesses. Last month Cameroon’s incumbent Camtel announced that it would build a 5,600km national fibre backbone, with links to Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, and Equatorial Guinea. The World Bank will be providing financial assistance for these links as well, also funding links to Chad, Central African Republic, and DRC.

Orange Madagascar announced that it had completed the Lion cable project. The 1,800km cable offers 1.3 Tbps, connecting Madagascar, Reunion, and Maritius. The cable should cut existing tariffs by five times.

Here in the good ol’ RSA, we also have progress. Dark Fibre Africa has recently launched its 800km fibre network in collaboration with Cisco Systems. Dark Fibre Africa is not a service provider, though. It owns, builds, maintains, secures, and monitors the dark fibre network, leasing out the infrastructure. Any businesses wanting to make use of the DFA network will need to light the fibre themselves, meaning they will need to purchase the necessary equipment to be able to connect to DFA’s network.

In January, Neotel announced it would partner with MTN to build a 5,000km national network linking major urban centres with Seacom, with the first leg of the network connecting Johannesburg to Durban scheduled to be completed before the end of the year.

Neotel already has 2000- 3000km of fibre in the metro areas of Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Cape Town. The financial burden of the long-haul network is expected to be R2-billion on cabling alone(transmission equipment will bring the cost to R2.5-billion), a cost that Neotel will share with MTN and Vodacom.

The big news this week is that Seacom has been delayed by a month due to pirate activity in April and May 2009.

According to the Seacom blog, an increase in pirate activity in April and May 2009 has necessitated a change in their installation plans, which will result in a delay of around a month.

The launch date has been moved from 27 June 2009 to 23 July 2009.

Seacom is still making progress, though: that section of the cable has since been completed, and the section connecting Mumbai to Africa is expected to be spliced shortly. All the South and East African landing stations have already undergone successful testing.

90% drop in bandwidth prices? EASSyer said than done.

When Seacom was first announced, a 90% drop in bandwidth pricing was claimed to become a reality. We’ve already seen about half of that drop, though. Keep in mind that bandwidth costs aren’t the only costs that ISPs have to deal with: there are quite a few overheads. It costs the same to administer a 1 gig account as a 100 gig one, so pricing on the lower end won’t drop. One must also keep in mind the costs of the network provider’s infrastructure, the cost of the customer’s modem, as well as marketing, distribution, and support.

The large ISPs can’t switch all their bandwidth to Seacom the minute it goes live, as they have contracts in place which need to lapse, meaning that price drops are even further away than we might like.

Telkom’s pitiful announcement gives a painful taste of what the telecommunication companies intend to satisfy us with. They claim that there is too much pent-up demand and that EASSy and MAINONE are needed before we expect a real drop in pricing.

In February, general data manager at MTN Brian Seligman said “we are going to see changes in pricing [as opposed to real decreases], we are going to see changes in structure, and one of the biggest misnomers out there is that these international cables landing are going to drop the price of data by 90%”.

Head of Commercial at iBurst, Steve Briggs, has also been quoted as saying “consumers should not expect to see the sharp falls in broadband pricing that some of the more optimistic commentators have predicted”.

MTN’s Seligman says, “You are going to see different ways of packaging; you are going to see some incredibly innovative ideas from MTN over the course of this year in terms of making data significantly more affordable, significantly less expensive for customers, and that basic R2/MB – that’s not going to change significantly in the foreseeable future.”

Unfortunately there’s no real reason for ISPs to drop bandwidth costs. The vast majority of subscribers do not even deplete their current 2GB limits, so instead of dropping prices extra data will be bundled keeping revenues high, similar to Vodacom’s current data deal.

R2 a megabyte! That’s how much you pay when you go out of bundle (OOB) using 3G (on MTN and Vodacom). That’s R2048 a gig! I like buying 10 megabyte bundles thinking I’m getting a good deal – “only” R1024 a gig. On ADSL you can get R60 a gig and that’s shaped. For uncapped you’re looking at R1000 a month excluding line rental, and you still have a rolling threshold during office hours.

The excuse we always get is that bandwidth is limited in South Africa due to there only being one undersea cable supplying us bandwidth, namely SAFE/SAT3. Due to this they manage our usage by not just giving us bit caps, but shaping our connections too. This means that any traffic that’s not for browsing (HTTP/HTTPS) or email (POP3) receives a lower priority. If you play a multiplayer game with overseas servers/players, you will get pings of around 200ms-400ms higher than what you would have got had your line not been shaped.

All this should change come 17^th June thanks to the 13 700 km SEACOM (South and East Africa submarine cable systems) undersea cable. SEACOM will connect South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania and Kenya to India,Egypt, Italy, France, and finally terminate in the United Kingdom. At the moment there aren’t any cables along the East coast of Africa; SEACOM will bring cheap bandwidth to East African countries that could previously only make use of satellites for their bandwidth needs. SEACOM is being designed with a nominal capacity of 1,280 Gb/s, comprised of two fibre pairs. That’s about ten times the amount provided by SAT3/SAFE.

The east coast of Africa won't be clear for much longer.

SEACOM has already released pricing to the press. Going after volume to bring up profits is something that all South Africans should appreciate. Rumours are that Vodacom will decrease OOB rates by 50% to R1 a meg, and while 50% is great, I still feel that R1024 a gig is a bit much. Nevertheless, the other cell companies will likely announce similar price drops lest they lose subscribers. While bandwidth prices will come down, do not expect your monthly bill to come down by too much. Bandwidth is merely one of the costs that ISPs have. What you will get, though, is more value for your money. That 1 gig account that you pay R199p/m for might just turn into 5 or even 10 gigs.

What I’m worried about is the local infrastructure. Telkom’s aging and poorly maintained ADSL infrastructure is barely coping as it is. With Telkom offering 7.2Mb/s 3G while ADSL speeds are still at around 4Mb/s, I have little faith that they will upgrade the overloaded exchanges. Don’t even get me started on ADSL 2+. At this point, though, I’d actually prefer more usage per month than a faster line. How Telkom calls their packages “broadband” when you can’t even keep your line maxed out for 5% of the month is beyond me.