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EASSy on track says SA's Neotel

15 Oct 2009

Neotel has announced that the construction of the East African Submarine Cable (EASSy), one of four undersea cables in which the converged network operator is involved, is still on track. This follows the recent Management Committee of the EASSy Cable held at Livingstone in Zambia at which Neotel is represented.

“As a local company providing global access, we are the only telecoms company that offers connectivity through all international cabling systems - Eassy (East Africa), WACS (West Africa), SAFE/SAT 3 and Seacom,” says Angus Hay, executive head of technology at Neotel.

“This heralds a new age of bandwidth competition, access and affordability for Africa to aggressively compete on the world stage as this will increase the available international bandwidth, as well as the level of reliability of international links,” he said.

The physical installation of the EASSy cable will start with the laying of the shore-end cable in Maputo, Mozambique. The cable, which has been shipped from the Alcatel-Lucent factory in Calais, France, should be installed in the coming weeks. The first cable loading on board a ship started in September 2009 in preparation for laying it in the next few months.

During the meeting in Zambia, the Management Committee noted that the manufacture of various elements of the EASSy system is at an advanced stage of manufacturing. The nine cable landing stations namely, Port Sudan, Djibouti, Mogadishu (Somalia), Mombasa (Kenya), Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Moroni (Comoros), Toliary (Madagascar), Maputo (Mozambique) and Mtunzini (South Africa) are either ready or in the final stages of construction.

The Management Committee is confident EASSy will meet the ‘Ready for Service' date on 30 June 2010, as originally planned.

EASSy is a consortium of 27 operators building an open access international fibre optic submarine cable, comprising Botswana Telecommunications Corporation, Bharti, BT, Comores Telecom, Etisalat (UAE), Neotel (South Africa), France Telecom, Mauritius Telecom, MTN Group, STC Group, Sudan Telecom, Telecom Malagasy, TTCL (Tanzania), Telkom South Africa, Vodacom, Zamtel and WIOCC, a joint venture comprising Botswana Telecommunications Corporation, Dalkom Somalia, Djibouti Telecom, Gilat Satcom Nigeria, Lesotho C.A., Onatel Burundi, Telecomunicaçoes de Mozambique, Telkom Kenya, UCOM Burundi, Uganda Telecom and Zanzibar Telecom.