SEACOM goes live tomorrow!

Tomorrow, at long last, the SEACOM undersea cable, linking London, Marseille, and Mumbai to South Africa, with landings along the East African coast (Djibouti, Mombasa, Dar Es Salaam,Toliara, and Maputo), is finally going online. The cable landed in Mombasa about a month ago, but the actual activation of the system was delayed due to increased Somali pirate activity.

But it sounds as though everything is in place -- the land fibre backhauls to Nairobi, Kampala, Kigali, and so forth are in place, and it sounds as though the ISPs have begun to buy into it. For the moment, I understand that it is limited to a capacity of approximately 80Gbps (articles here and here), which is no trivial amount of bandwidth, by African standards, but is a far cry from the 1.28Tbps the cable will ultimately be able to carry.

Still, this is very exciting. Hopefully I'll have more to report tomorrow or Friday on the matter, as my friend and Appfrica fellow Josh Goldstein (see his excellent blog "In an African Minute" -- I'd highly recommend it for those interested in these issues, as well as life in Kampala) has secured an invitation to the event as a member of the press and will be granted an exclusive interview with one of the SEACOM officials present (I think the President or CEO, but I'm not positive).

This should be very interesting, although I'm not sure how soon we will see any meaningful bandwidth increases. Price drops, I fear, are further-off still. I would not be surprised if speeds begin to improve at least a bit while I'm still here, though; I wouldn't say the same for price. Still, in the long term, this is huge for both, and the carrying capacity of the cable itself should allow room for substantial Internet growth in the region as providers see the demand is there and respond accordingly.

In case I haven't said it enough yet, it's really exciting to be here for this rather momentous event in the (short) history of African Internet. I'll keep you posted as it unfolds further.