South Atlantic Express cable’s finance talks “well advanced”
The newly appointed CEO at eFive Telecoms confirmed that the financial discussions for the 10,000-kilometre South Atlantic Express (SAex) cable are in advanced stages. The cable will connect South Africa with Brazil, and is said to cost around R3 billion.
A map of the departure points from South Africa (image: eFive Telecoms)
“I am pleased to advise that the vendor selection process is close to being finalised and finance discussions are well advanced,” Rosalind Thomas, CEO of eFive Telecoms told BusinessTech. The time-frame for the completion is before June 2013, commented Lawrence Mulaudzi, the MD of eFive in April last year.
“The group said that the Bank of China announced that it was interested in investing 60% of the funds required for the project. The Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa has also expressed interest in funding. SAex is a proposed submarine communications cable linking South Africa and Angola to Brazil with onward connectivity to the United States that will connect to the existing GlobeNet cable system,” BusinessTech wrote.
When the cable is completed, it will have a capacity of 12.8 TBit/s and will consist of four fibre pairs, each capable of carrying 3,2TBit/s of data using 40GBit/s wavelength technology. Another two pairs will be extended into South Africa, while another pair is likely to go to Angola.
Charlie Fripp – Acting Online editor
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Please support our campaign to make this cable land at the isolated South Atlantic island of St Helena. It could provide broadband internet to the small population, give some technical benefits to eFive (especially when it comes to power supply of the submarine repeaters) and it would be in South Africa's taxpayers' interest since South Africa will partly fund the cable while it also is St Helena's most important trade partner (the only ship line goes to Cape Town) and will act as springboard for future tourism once the airport at St Helena has been built (commercial flights can virtually only originate from Cape Town). Thus any economic development of St Helena brought by broadband internet and reliable communications, which are essential for promoting tourism, will direclty benefit South Africa's economy.
For further details please visit our website at http://www.connectsthelena.org/