In the beginner’s mind there are…
I’ve now moved the African Undersea Cables map to a permanent page that I will update as new information emerges. The latest revision includes updates of:
The undersea cable environment around the African continent continues to evolve. Proposed cables appear, disappear, merge. A testament to the competitive environment. In this latest update, I have added the MaIN OnE cable which appears to be making progress. Thanks to Abi Jagun for finding their real website.
In the meantime Infraco AWCC, SAT4, and UhuruNet have all morphed into the West Africa Cable System (WACS). Thus WACS is now a “cartel” consisting of Telkom, Vodacom, MTN, Neotel, and Infraco, with UhuruNet squeezed in there as well, if only so that the South African Department of Communications should not look like complete idiots. As if that would save them.
As before, you can download a version in SVG format so that you can edit the map yourself. Right click on the link and choose Save As otherwise your clever browser may try to render the image.
Next I may try to do an investment map to look at who will own all this bandwidth.
Note: the most up-to-date version of this map can be found at http://manypossibilities.net/african-undersea-cables.
So what might the undersea cable environment for sub-Saharan Africa look like by the end of 2010? Perhaps it will look a bit like this:
If anyone has a proposed map for Uhurunet and Main One, I would love to know about it.
You can download a version in SVG format so that you can edit the map yourself. Right click on the link and choose Save As otherwise your clever browser may try to render the image.
I have been gradually getting my head around bandwidth purchasing models for undersea cables. In my second contribution to the Mail & Guardian’s innovative Techleader site, I use a real estate metaphor to contrast the various scenarios.
Bill St. Arnaud points out that Pipe International, who are building an undersea cable from Sydney to Guam, have taken a completely transparent approach to communicating about project development and progress. Even to the point of having dynamic online maps of cable development.
Pipe International have set up a blog, a progress table, discussion forum, and photo/video gallery. Here in South Africa, Infraco could take a page out of their book. Fin24.com recently posted news of a statement released by the SA government communication and information service on Tuesday May 6th that the African West Coast Cable (AWCC) would be built by Infraco in time for the World Cup in 2010. The cable would have a whopping 3.84 terabits in capacity and will cover 13,000km from South Africa to the Uk stopping at 10 countries along the way.
I tried to follow up on this article looking for the statement mentioned in the article but it wasn’t available on the SA Communication and Information Services site. I wrote to request a copy of the statement and was sent a month-old statement regarding Infraco. Still looking for it if anyone has a pointer.
It would be amazing if the AWCC/Infraco initiative were to take a similar approach to Pipe International. It would increase both buy-in and confidence in the initiative. An updated table of African undersea cable initiatives is available here.
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