Publications
Partners
Johannesburg - Pan-African telecoms service provider Seacom - which manages a sub-sea broadband cable along Africa’s East coast - is now targeting enterprises.
The company on Thursday launched Seacom Business, which plans to tap its undersea network and supply high-speed connectivity and cloud services to corporates in South Africa and other parts of Africa. Other services are set to include voice of internet protocol (VOIP) offerings as well.
The connectivity is planned to be supplied over the ‘last-mile’ or terrestrial fibre networks that ultimately connect to Seacom’s undersea network.
Broadband speeds on Seacom Business’ connectivity offering are expected to range from 25Mbps to 1Gbps, which forms part of the company’s fibre internet access product.
Seacom is also rolling out fibre to 40 or so precincts to allow clients to connect to its services, said Grant Parker, head of Seacom Business in a media briefing on Thursday.
“Really we are no longer just the Seacom cable system,” said Byron Clatterbuck, Seacom’s chief executive officer.
“Today our network is very resilient and it's all fibre based,” he added.
Seacom officials also said that since a “soft launch” of its enterprise offering last year, the company is “already signing up 20-plus corporate and SME (small to medium enterprise) customers a month and has appointed some 20 business partners to support its drive into a new market”.
To date, Seacom Business has about 150 customers, according to Parker.
The move to target corporates on the ground comes after Seacom built the first submarine broadband cable system along Africa’s East coast in 2009.
The cable stretches 17 000 km, connects to Europe and uses other existing undersea cables, such as the West Africa Cable System (WACS) for redundancy.
