SA - and Africa at large - have come a long way in terms of international connectivity, which is partly the reason there are no ground-breaking subsea arrivals like Seacom expected in 2015. Yet, development in terms of upgrades on ocean floors that facilitates better connectivity will be far from dormant.
Mark McCallum, director and head of global services Africa at Orange Business Services (OBS), notes, in just over a decade, SA has moved from pure dependency on SAT3/SAFE (2002) to the addition of Seacom (2009), Eassy (2010) and WACS (2012).
"This took our capacity into SA (SAT3/SAFE) from approximately 800Gbps, up to almost 12Tbps - a 15-fold capacity growth. ACE could add another 5Tbps when it eventually lands in SA."
The benefits, says McCallum, range from drastically reduced broadband Internet pricing - for fixed and mobile Internet services - to improved resiliency and less dependency on single cable platforms. "Recall the Seacom resiliency issues in 2010, prior to them improving this with bi-lateral resiliency agreements."
Africa Analysis analyst Dobek Pater says consumers and businesses alike have benefitted greatly from ocean bed developments. "[There is] much greater international capacity available, and [there have been] significant price decreases in data over the past several years."
He notes, though, other elements that contributed here are the build-out of additional domestic long-haul routes, metro networks and more recently access networks, upgrades in DSL infrastructure, 3G build-out, fibre access and long-term evolution.
Former Independent Communications Authority of SA councillor William Stucke recently noted that overall, the country had seen "enormous progress" on the connectivity front. In terms of international connectivity and submarine cables - of which SA now has five landing on its shores (WACS, Seacom, SAT-3, SAFE and Eassy), up from the lone South Atlantic-2 (SAT-2) that served the country up until 2002 - Stucke said the country is "sorted".
"Seacom landed in 2009, bringing with it a low-cost, high-volume business model and this was followed by enough others to provide true competition."
What's to come
McCallum says he believes there is still much possibility for fixed and mobile broadband pricing to come down on the back of the capacity increases SA is seeing. "Certainly, resiliency has drastically improved and the service providers have matured in their approach to building our resilient and robust broadband networks." Yet, he notes: "Broadband Internet price points are still drastically higher than in other international market in Europe, APAC (Asia Pacific) and the Americas."
Pater adds there have been a couple of cable projects that were considered, like the BRICS cable, SAex cable (to Angola and across the Atlantic to Brazil) and extending the ACE cable from central Africa to SA. "However, all of these projects have been put on the back burner or abandoned for now as there is no real economic case for them."
He says SA currently has "more than sufficient" capacity on international routes and more upgrades will be done on the existing cables, thus generating more capacity. "At present, we are experiencing some companies practically dumping international capacity at cost, just to sell it."
More investment is likely to happen in the future - at least through cable upgrades - says Pater, "but I am not sure how quickly we will see another cable landing in SA".
Outlining pipeline projects around SA, McCallum lists the South Atlantic System, Wasace South, SAex and the BRICS cable. "The South Atlantic Cable System is planned to enter service in late 2016 or early 2017. It looks like it has evolved from the SAex cable that was being touted in 2012. Wasace South was supposed to launch this year and construction on SAex is beginning in 2015 [and it is] planned to enter service in 2017. The BRICS cable was supposed to be complete late this year, but it is not clear if this is on track."
OBS owns the 2 Oceans Cable Maintenance Agreement for operation in the South of Atlantic and Indian oceans from Cape Town. Scope of this contract covers all the way from Cape Verde through to the Horn of Africa. It also plays a significant role in the maintenance of the subsea cables surrounding Africa.
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