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Johannesburg - Africa is to get more internet bandwidth as an agreement for a sixth undersea fibre-optic cable, to be built along its west coast, was signed on Wednesday.
These cables are likely to result in a hundredfold growth of international bandwidth capacity coming into Africa by the end of 2011, according to the Internet Access in South Africa 2008 study.
The 13 000km West Africa Cable System (Wacs) is a planned submarine communications cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa.
The cable is also expected to land in at least 10 other west African countries and will provide the continent with an additional 3.84 terabits/second of bandwidth when it is fully operational.
"The Wacs agreement puts in place the final spark for the broadband revolution that is about to sweep Africa," said World Wide Worx MD Arthur Goldstuck.
"The real significance of all these undersea cables is that they will in turn lead to further infrastructure expansion to bring this bandwidth to end-users, especially in the business world."
Various companies are involved in the Wacs project, including Vodacom, MTN, Neotel, Telkom and Broadband Infraco.
The Internet Access in South Africa 2008 study, conducted by World Wide Worx and supported by Cisco Systems, shows that international bandwidth available to sub-Saharan Africa was 80 gigabits per second at the end of 2008.
This was split between the Telkom-controlled Sat3/Safe cable and the West African Atlantis-2 cable.
But, according to the report, the capacity will rise to about 10 terabits per second by the end of 2011, or 120 times the 2008 capacity.
The increased capacity is the combined result of an upgrade of the Sat3 cable, Seacom, GLO-1 and Teams cables becoming operational in 2009, the EASSy and MainOne set to go live in 2010 and the Wacs cable due to go live in 2011.
Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group's senior manager Reshaad Sha said: "It is encouraging to witness and be part of the telecommunications revolution that Africa is currently undergoing. The role that the undersea cable operators will play is crucial to both the developmental and economic agendas that have and are being set by African governments."
However, there may still be obstacles ahead.
"The telecoms operators and governments are still required to fulfil the role of delivering this connectivity to their citizens. This will probably be the most challenging role in realising the benefits of the terabits of bandwidth that will be reaching the African coastlines," said Sha.
- Fin24.com