Municipal Broadband Investment in South Africa

There’s an interesting AFP article on the city of Johannesburg’s 1 billion Rand (~105 million USD) contract with Ericsson to deliver municipal broadband infrastructure.  In it they quote an anonymous “telecoms expert” who says:

…that municipalities were already stretched to provide basic utility services, and that the provisioning of telecoms services would simply put additional strain [...]

Undersea Cables Update

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 EASSy cable to reflect its growth to 1.4 terabits
the TEAMS cable to reflect its growth to 1.2 terabits (120 gigabits initial)
the SAT3 cable to remove the proposed 2010 [...]

How To Be Transparent in Fibre Optic Cable Deployment

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, [...]