While Nigerian-owned Main One undersea cable going live last week is good news for the continent, its impact in the short-term won't be that strongly felt, says Mike van den Berg, CEO of Gateway Communications.
Main One is a privately owned system that runs on the African West Coast from Nigeria and Ghana, and runs for about 7 000km with initial landings in Portugal. The system has a capacity of 1.92 Terabits per second.
Planned landings and extensions for the cable being mooted by Main One include an extension that will run down the West Coast to land at Cape Town, with stops at Angola, Congo and the Ivory Coast. Should these mooted extensions happen then this would double the length of the cable to around 14 000kms.
Main One is one of 10 undersea cables either being planned or currently under construction around the African continent. Some of the cables, such as Seacom and Eassy, on the east coast, have either become operational or are undergoing final tests.
Other cables include a planned west coast cable led by France Telekom, called ACE (African Coast to Europe), and WACS (West African Cable System) that comprises a consortium including SA's Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, and Broadband Infraco. Both of these cables are due to become operational during the latter part of 2011.
“It is good to see these projects coming alive as they increase competition, bring down prices and help stimulate the supply of services into the continent, and then stimulate economic activity,” Van den Berg says.
He says prices on the notoriously tightly controlled SAT-3 undersea cable by Telkom have begun to fall, but that system, despite an upgrade almost two years ago, was running out of capacity.
“Good telecommunications planning means that we have multiple redundancy routes. Until recently, most redundancy had to be done via satellite links and that was expensive and there is not much spare capacity on the satellite systems anyway. More cable systems give us a lot of extra options,” Van den Berg says.
Despite some misgivings by various industry observers about the number of undersea cables being planned, Van den Berg says their true impact still has to be determined.
“We still don't know what will happen. Some have said there is not enough business on the continent to support these cables, but we are still expecting rapid growth in Internet and mobile services,” he says.
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