Newswise — For now, the cable (South Atlantic Telecommunications Cable No. 3/West African Submarine Cable/South Africa-Far East) is perhaps one of the most underutilized technological resources on Earth. Designed to handle 5.8 million phone calls simultaneously, the SAT-3 traces Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama's 15th-century journey from Portugal to Cochin, India. The SAT-3 section of the cable stretches 14 341 km from Sesimbra, Portugal to Melkbosstrand, South Africa, passing through eight west African countries along the way. At Melkbosstrand the SAT-3 hooks up to the 13 104 km-long SAFE portion of the cable, which goes through Reunion and Mauritius Islands, splitting into two branches to terminate at Cochin, India and Penang, Malaysia. The cable is owned by a consortium of 36 companies, including many African national telecommunications incumbents, Nigeria's Nigerian Telecommunications among them, which contributed nearly $50 million to the cost of the cable, and South Africa's Telkom SA, which chipped in $85 million.
It's one thing to lay a fiber-optic undersea cable and bring it to shore. It's quite another, however, to create the internal infrastructure necessary to distribute that bandwidth, as IEEE Spectrum senior associate editor Harry Goldstein discovered when he followed the cable from Nigeria to South Africa in June.
Internet traffic from Africa has increased five-fold over the last four years. But according to Alan Mauldin, senior analyst at TeleGeography, Inc., a research division of PriMetrica Inc., a year after the SAT-3 cable was turned on, the total Internet capacity between Africa and the United States is still only 1.351 Gb/s; between Africa and Europe 1.875 Gb/s, for a total of 3.226 Gb/s. Africa, with about 10 percent of the world's population, only accounts for 0.2 percent of the world's total international Internet capacity.
While TeleGeography's estimates peg capacity usage on the cable at less than 3 percent of its design maximum, the consortium sees the glass fiber as half full. "The usage is already beyond expectations, not only for South Africa, but the whole of Western Africa," says Kobus Stoeder, Acting Executive, Global Capacity Business, International and Special Markets Segment for Telkom South Africa, the administrator of the cable for the consortium. "The only aspect that may be causing some growth stagnation is that in many of these countries, the backhaul network is not quite accessible or may not be fully in place or may not have the capacity to support international access."
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