The 10 500km Eastern African Submarine Cable System (Eassy) has officially been handed over to its largest investor, the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC).
Subcontractor Alcatel-Lucent handed over the cable to WIOCC yesterday afternoon.
According to WIOCC CEO Chris Wood, the testing of the cable is now complete and the first circuits are already being provisioned on the network.
He says the success of the model used by WIOCC-Eassy means 26 telecoms companies from SA and Africa are already involved and loading their traffic onto Eassy.
"This means that our customers will start to see the benefits of this new capacity very quickly,” says WIOCC's director of business development and international marketing, Mike Last.
Eassy delivers 1.4Tbps of capacity, of which WIOCC has already sold more than 7Gbps. The company, which has a 29% stake in the system, says it has another 80Gbps+ upgrade planned for next year. At the moment, the capacity functions on three 10Gbps wavelengths, but will likely expand to 40Gbps wavelengths in the future, which will significantly bring down bandwidth cost on the cable.
The submarine cable connects SA with eight other African countries and is the first east coast system for traffic to key points in Europe and North America.
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