This weekend, Alcatel-Lucent’s fully-laden cable-laying ship will commence laying the southern portion of the EASSy cable up the coastline from Mtunzini in Durban, South Africa. The addition of EASSy will significantly boost international bandwidth capacity and redundancy and increase Internet connectivity competition in South Africa.
According to Dr Angus Hay, executive head of technology at Neotel, “The EASSy cable is now in its final rollout phase and will soon increase competition in the local market, and hopefully also accelerate ongoing price reduction for connectivity.”
Neotel is already connected to SEACOM, SAT-3 and SAFE cables, making its connection to EASSy the fourth.
“Neotel will now have connections to four cables, meaning that consumers are highly unlikely to experience downtime, after the EASSy cable goes live around August this year. As a member of the EASSy consortium, we are investing around 80 million Rand into this project so as to provide a wider range of connectivity options to our customers.”
Neotel’s reliability and connectivity is bound to improve through its link to the four cables, and with access to Tata Communications’ hundreds of thousands of kilometres of submarine cable routes spanning the globe.
