The biggest problem with Telkom's SAT-3 undersea cable is that it never went bankrupt, said Johan Meyer, Telkom's group executive for global capacity service.
Meyer, who has been intimately involved in the SAT-3 West Coast cable, which is SA's primary undersea link for telecommunications and Internet connectivity with the rest of the world, said: "If SAT-3 had gone bankrupt, then we would have had a very different scenario to what we have today, and may even have found ourselves in a similar position to the North Atlantic cables."
He was responding yesterday to comments made during a debate on pan-African connectivity at the Capacity Africa 2007 Conference, in Cape Town.
Meyer followed up by saying that many of the North Atlantic cable operators were now in the situation where they were selling bandwidth at below their real wholesale rates. They were beginning to run out of capacity, but were not receiving the revenue they needed to lay more cable.
Wessel van der Vyver, GM of international business for Telecom Namibia, opened the discussion by saying that Telkom was one of the key impediments to his company lowering its own broadband and interconnectivity costs.
"Essentially, Nambia is a landlocked country in terms of undersea cable because SAT-3 lands in Angola and in SA. We were hoping to get a landing in Namibia, but this hasn't happened."
Let down
Later, Van der Vyver said Telecom Namibia was also "disappointed" that the proposed undersea cables being planned by the South African government's new broadband infrastructure supplier, Infraco, was also ignoring his country.
"It would be a pity if another cable is built and it leaves us in the same situation."
During the discussion, the lack of satellite capacity came under the spotlight.
Pedro Camacho, CEO and owner of Blue Sky Satellite Communications, said satellite capacity was at a premium, with a long waiting list.
"With the failure of some satellites and the increasing need for telecommunications, capacity is at a premium. In fact, I am hoping to buy some capacity from delegates at this conference," he said.
Peter Gbedemah, Gateway Communications CEO, responded by saying innovative use of technology was helping to overcome some of the capacity problems by shortening satellite hops and compression of data.
Stephane Delorme, head of international business for Alcatel-Lucent, said international and regional high bandwidth connectivity is strongly needed on the African East and West coasts.
Share