UUNET SA will officially deliver its SAT3/WASC (South Atlantic Cable no 3 and West African Submarine Cable) capabilities into the local market as of 1 November, bringing with it a number of customer benefits including reliability of African Internet offerings, increase of speed and longer term cost reduction implications.
SAT 3, the 120-Gigabit fibre cable that runs from Cape Town up the West African coast and terminating in Europe, is expected to bring a new era of connectivity for Africa.
"To date there has been quite a bit of discussion around the merits of SAT 3, touting the benefits of this fibre cable. Unfortunately there were many unforeseen delays in delivering this cable to South African businesses and this led to a large expectation within the market that could not be fulfilled," says Barry Gill product marketing manager at UUNET SA. "SAT 3 will not only bring with it better service for applications over IP to international regions, but overall user experience is also going to be tangibly increased over the next few years.
"Previously, distance, lack of capacity and existing infrastructure problems resulted in a limited, high cost and unreliable service, however with the advent of SAT 3 Africa has been given the opportunity to grow into a high speed communication arena on par with the rest of the world," adds Gill.
Locally, many of the ISPs that have their own international capacity, will be adding new capabilities via SAT 3 and only upgrading existing capacity from satellite to fibre as and when they their capacity contracts expire, essentially creating an augmented network.
"UUNET SA has taken the decision to completely replace its satellite offering and transfer to fibre over time as we have recognised the long-term viability and potential to our customers, for whom we will be able to more than halve the round-trip time for a packet over the international circuits. This means that we are now able to effectively move towards VOIP, as SAT 3 makes it a usable reality to business and consumer Internet users locally," concludes Gill.
UUNET SA, a WorldCom company, is southern Africa`s only pan-African provider of Internet-based network services and is the largest global carrier of Internet traffic. The company provides Internet connectivity and corporate network services to major corporations as well as access services to Internet service providers.
All UUNET SA products and services are delivered within the required regulatory conditions.
For more information, please visit the UUNET SA Web site at www.uunet.co.za.
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