The SAT-3/WASC/SAFE undersea fibre optic cable, which links Europe to Asia via Cape Town, was officially inaugurated in the West African capital of Dakar, Senegal, today.
The 28 800km cable is a combination of two distinct projects, the South African/Far East (SAFE) cable, which connects Cape Town to India and Malaysia via Mauritius, and the SAT-3/West African Submarine Cable (WASC), which links Portugal to SA, with landing points in eight African countries along the way.
The two cables meet at Melkbosstrand in the Cape, with a second South African landing point at Mtunzini off the east coast of SA.
Telkom initiated the $639 million, three-year process of laying the cable and setting up landing points. It contributed around $85 million to the project, but owns a proportionally larger 16% of the consortium that owns the cable, and will have access to a third of its capacity.
"We have indefeasible rights of use to 30%, the single largest access to capacity in the group," says Telkom CEO Sizwe Nxasana.
The rest of the consortium is made up of 35 African, European, American and Asian telecommunications operators and countries.
Feeling the benefits
Today`s launch, hosted by Senegalese president Abdoulaye Wade at the landing point in this country and attended by communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri, is the first ceremony around the completion of the cable. The Eastern length is to get its own launch in June, with planned participation from president Thabo Mbeki.
However, the cable has already passed its first test-by-fire, and South African businesses and consumers have felt its impact on pricing since January.
"The cable, for all intents and purposes, is functional," says Telkom chief technology officer Reuben September. And during a failure of another cable connecting Europe and Asia, it carried live traffic as the fail-over route, as part of its capacity has been designated.
The increase in bandwidth the cable brings (Telkom will take up 2.5Gbps on it initially) will see a decrease in the price of international voice and data traffic from and to SA. However, Telkom says it anticipated this when it changed its tariffs in January, and the savings have already been transferred to its customers.
"We lowered our international tariffs for data and voice in a direct correlation to what we saw bandwidth costing us," says September.
African renaissance beats Africa ONE
The project came in around R400 million over budget and a year late. The cable was initially scheduled to be switched on in the first quarter of 2001, then in December, but technical and political problems saw delays and costs mounting.
"It [the consortium of owners] is a structure that works by consensus," says Nxasana.
Yet the project is, and will be, held up as an example of the African renaissance at work. Forty-six percent of the owning consortium is in the hands of African operators or governments. As such, they expect to reap both telecommunications and financial rewards over its 20-year lifetime.
They also expect immediate savings on dollar payments to European and American operators. The consortium estimates that $300 million that was paid by its members to switch traffic on other continents, sometimes traffic between two neighbouring African countries, will now stay in Africa.
A feasibility study is currently underway to determine if the cable can be extended up the East coast of the continent, to Ethiopia and beyond, and should be completed in three months. If the plan is approved the final cable would virtually encircle the continent, which is exactly the goal of the American Africa ONE consortium. The private group planned such a cable at a cost of $1.6 billion. It was due for completion this year but the project seems to have stalled before garnering the needed investment, and even if it should start laying down cable this year, it is conservatively estimated that it will take two years to complete.
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