Africa has experienced a “torrid time” over the past 10 months with multiple outages on the East and West coasts from a subsea perspective.
That’s the word from Prenesh Padayachee, chief digital and operations officer at Seacom, in an interview with ITWeb.
In this episode of ITWeb TV, Padayachee discusses Seacom’s business, the challenges it has faced this year, and how it navigated them.
“There’s been a multitude of issues, from subsea rock falls to anchor drags, from vessels through to trawling activity,” he says.
“Specifically, in the East coast, there have been multiple cable issues in the Red Sea, as well as two rock falls in the West Coast. What that’s highlighted for us is the need for terrestrial connectivity on the continent,” says Padayachee.
He acknowledges the increase in capacity from multiple cable landings in Africa, but asserts that there is still a need to extend this capacity to remote and underserved regions.
“It’s difficult to plan around the failure scenario, but what we, as Seacom, do is – if you look at just the subsea components of it, we’ve got capacity on both coasts; we’ve got access to two cable systems on both coasts; but we go a level further than that as well; we also do to the level of vendor independence across the coasts…so we use different vendors on the one coast as compared to the other.
“That just mitigates for us as well at a component level, at a software level, all those things that you start to need to look at when it comes to building networks.”
Seacom also applies this model to its terrestrial connectivity strategy.
“So multiple vendors terrestrially, and different vendors on the equipment side of things, and then we tend to build our network in a diverse fashion, using multiple routes. If you take South Africa as the example, we even go down into load-shedding schedules just to make sure we have sufficient power for capacity between the major nodes in the country,” says Padayachee.
Padayachee believes growth of Africa’s subsea cable space will be driven through collaboration between specialist telecoms operators and hyperscalers.
“I do think that if you look at the terrestrial connectivity, the telcos will play a larger role than hyperscalers… (because) the hyperscalers will bring the content to the continent, but how do you get it then to the landlocked countries and the likes? This is where collaboration between role players will come into play.”
Padayachee adds that the telecommunications services and solutions industry must present a united front to deal with vandalism, an issue that is on the increase, especially in South Africa.
“I think the economic situation in the country drives a lot of that; the fact that there is a secondary industry for cables drives a lot of that,” he says.
Padayachee is of the view that in the event of an outage on networks, operators should rather focus on collaboration and teamwork to re-establish connectivity, than on where they can score new business.
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