Seacom is expanding its services to Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. The network expansion is coupled with Seacom's recent acquisition of east and west coast submarine cable capacity.
Seacom says it will continue to partner with established players to provide broadband services in these countries.
According to Seacom's head of product strategy, Suveer Ramdhani, this new development is an integral part of Seacom's network strategy in Africa and particularly in countries with limited connectivity.
“We will continue to build relationships to meet our customers' growing need for resilient and seamless capacity. This is part of Seacom's objective to build the African Internet.”
Seacom was launched commercially in SA 18 months ago, and it says several more African countries are expected to access the network during the course of the year.
WWW Strategy MD Steven Ambrose explains that SA has undergone an Internet revolution in the past few years; and specifically the international bandwidth bottleneck has been effectively removed, with Seacom and others coming online.
According to a recent report from Research and Markets, SA's telecoms sector boasts the continent's most advanced networks in terms of technology deployed and services provided.
The report says the end of Telkom's monopoly on international submarine fibre-optic cables, with the arrival of Seacom as the second submarine international cable in 2009, has brought down the cost of international bandwidth dramatically.
Seacom says it is aiming to create an “African Internet experience characterised by local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets”.
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