Neotel is in discussions with undersea cable consortium Seacom to have more capacity lit up on the cable soon.
Angus Hay, Neotel's executive head of technology, says Africa's reaction to Seacom has been astounding, and the company has sold all the available capacity on the cable in under a year. “The growth has been spectacular,” he notes.
Neotel is now in discussions with the consortium to open up more capacity on the line; however, Hay will not indicate how much Neotel hopes to light up for fear of disrupting discussions.
Seacom lit up its first commercial service in July last year, providing a total of 10Gbps across the line. However, Hay says the entire allocation of capacity has been sold out, and Neotel now needs to convince the relevant parties to light up more access.
The cable has an actual capacity of 1.28TBps, leaving plenty of room for growth.
The news that the cable has been sold out shows a dramatic turnaround in the industry's perception of the new cable. Last year, Neotel was disgruntled by the lack of interest by businesses in purchasing Seacom capacity.
However, after several high-profile customers, like Internet Solutions, bought into the offering, wholesale capacity sales skyrocketed. According to Hay, SA's recent broadband war can be linked to Seacom's success on African shores.
Seacom was always expected to drive down the cost of international bandwidth, but this took slightly longer than many industry watchers had hoped.
Share
