Convergence Partners investee, Seacom, reports that, in 2012, it will upgrade its East African submarine cable and increase capacity to meet rising demand from the African continent.

In addition, Seacom will be expanding its core backhaul routes, such as the network between Johannesburg and Mtunzini, in KwaZulu-Natal, and the Marseilles to London cable.

Seacom CEO Mark Simpson says the operator’s network expansion plans and growth strategy will parallel Africa’s increasing telecommunications demand.

“What has become clear is that we must continue to expand its reach and performance. In fact, participation with other cable systems on the East and West African coasts signals the evolution of the Seacom network,” he says.

The Seacom submarine fibre-optic network system was launched on July 23, 2009, and serves to directly connect South Africa and East Africa with Europe and Southern Asia, covering a distance of over 17 000 km.

In July, Seacom and US-based digital optical network equipment supplier Infinera Corp, successfully trialled five 100 Gb/s channels of coherent optical transmission over a distance of 1 732 km using Infinera’s phototonic integrated circuits.

Simpson confirmed that the Infinera technology enables seamless upgrades from existing 10 Gb/s networks without having to upgrade the underlying fibre infrastructure. This will provide Seacom’s land-based network in South Africa with a total capacity of over 8 Tb/s per fibre an effective tenfold increase on its current capacity. This is in line with Seacom’s plans to expand the marine portion of the cable to over 4.8 Tb/s.

Article from Engineering News

SEACOM and MAIN One, the only two privately funded and open-access based African submarine fibre optic cable systems, were awarded “Best Pan African Initiative” at the AfricaCom Awards 2011 ceremony held in Cape Town, South Africa, last week. The award recognises an initiative taken by an organisation or a group of organisations to improve telecommunications services at a regional or continental level.

Main One Chief Executive Officer, Funke Opeke, explained: “Through this partnership, Main One and SEACOM have extended their individual cable systems to the opposite coasts of Africa without the efforts required to construct brand new routes.

“The ability to connect the east and west coast of the continent directly results in improved throughput but also provides a system around most of the continent which provides improved redundancy for telecommunications operators.”

Commenting on the award, Mark Simpson, SEACOM CEO, said: “We are honoured to be recognised once again for our efforts in continuously extending pan-African connectivity by investing in infrastructure, products and services that meet the continent’s insatiable demand for bandwidth.

“This partnership shows our determination to find viable ways to extend our system with partners who share our vision of building the African Internet on an open and equitable basis.”

In addition, MTN South Africa received awards for the ‘Best Network Improvement’, for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) pilot test in Gauteng province, and ‘Best Marketing Campaign (dubbed Bow Wow) for MTN Zone.

MTN South Africa’s Chief Marketing Officer, Serame Taukobong said: “MTN is ecstatic to have once again gained this important recognition. These awards go to thousands of MTN employees, our partners and customers who shared the MTN vision with us and ensured that our objectives are realised.

“The accolades are further affirmation from the industry and our customers that we are on the right track and need to cement the work we have been doing to provide our customers with the seamless experience they have come to expect from MTN.”

Article in Seacom website

The Guardian Nigeria

Gadget Magazine

Convergence Partners successfully participated as a sponsor and exhibitor at the 14^th annual AfricaCom Conference, held in Cape Town on 9 and 10 November 2011.  AfricaCom is the largest communications conference and exhibition on the Continent, gathering together more than 5,000 telecoms decision-makers. This is the second year that Convergence Partners has exhibited at the conference.

Exhibiting on the Convergence Partners’ stand was Comsol, FibreCo, Plessey and SEACOM with each of the companies presenting their offerings in the communications infrastructure space.

Andile Ngcaba, Chairman of Convergence Partners, presented a keynote address titled: “The political economy – where fibre optic meets spectrum” which focused on the need for innovative and visionary regulation of the radio spectrum.

The Convergence Partners’ group was also represented by Craig Wilson, CEO of Convergence Wireless Networks, as a panelist at the WiMAX South Africa conference held alongside AfricaCom.  Arif Hussain, CEO of FibreCo presented at the Master Class as well as on a panel discussions in the Capacity and Networks stream on fibre capacity in Africa.

Although, the Convergence Partners stand focused on showcasing our infrastructure portfolio assets a number of other companies participated in the conference including, Gemalto, Intelsat New Dawn and Dimension Data.

A highlight of the conference was SEACOM in partnership with Main ONE winning the award for most innovative infrastructure project of 2011 at the AfricaCom Awards.

Convergence Partners’ investee companies FibreCo and Seacom have provided support to the South African SKA Team (working under the guidance of the National Research Foundation and the Department of Science & Technology) in its bid for South African to host the SKA. The SKA team prepared and submitted their final bid on 15 September 2011. Convergence Partners extends its congratulations to these parties on achieving this milestone and hopes for a successful outcome to this project of significant national importance for South Africa and indeed the whole Southern African region. A bid decision is expected to be taken at the end of the first quarter of 2012.

The full text of the press release is in the attached

http://africa.tmcnet.com/news/2011/09/16/5783233.htm

SEACOM, the pan-African ICT enabler, announced the appointment of Mark Simpson as its Chief Executive Officer (CEO) with effect 5 September 2011. Brian Herlihy, the current CEO, will remain with the company as a member of the Board and take on the new role of Executive Director where he will focus on strategic projects essential for SEACOM’s continued success.

An industry veteran with more than 25 years’ experience in the telecommunications industry, Mark Simpson has held a number of senior international executive positions during his career, most recently as President and CEO of Pacific Crossing, a company operating a trans-Pacific cable system between the United States and Japan. He was also Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Asia Netcom (now Pacnet) and CEO of C2C Pte Ltd, Asia’s then largest cable system.

Commenting on his appointment, Mark Simpson said: “The SEACOM system has changed the African ICT landscape and I am pleased to be joining a market shaping company with a firm plan to evolve its core infrastructure and lead Africa into the next stage of ICT growth.

“It is a great opportunity to come to a company with a great team that has accomplished so much already and set out a clear strategic plan going forward. I look forward to working cooperatively with Brian, who has meant so much to SEACOM.”

Simpson will be responsible for leading SEACOM into a new era of data-based projects and growth assisted by Herlihy. In addition he will bring to bear his operational know-how in developing and running a best-in-class quality of service international network and ensuring that SEACOM’s customers are well served by its network, products and services.

In his new capacity as Executive Director, Brian Herlihy will retain a key role in the strategic direction of the company focusing on maximizing development opportunities and network deployment.

“I am delighted to welcome Mark on board. His experience will contribute considerably to securing SEACOM’s efforts to consistently improve network operations while maintaining our position of being first to market with new products.

“Mark’s extended experience ensures that SEACOM can leapfrog technology evolutions and develop a best-in-class pan-African solution.

“I am confident that our cooperation will provide me the capacity to pursue the correct partnerships necessary for SEACOM’s vision to truly lead the development of the African Internet,” concluded Brian Herlihy.

SEACOM Press Release

Read more here!

Article from Engineering News

Article from TechCentral

Seacom, a Convergence Partners investee company, has entered into a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Square Kilometre Array (SKA) South Africa to provide support for the country’s €1.5-billion SKA radio telescope project.

SKA South Africa site bid manager Dr. Bruce Wallace said in placing the SKA data transport capacity requirement in perspective, the SKA network is estimated to be 100 to 150 times larger than the current World Wide Web network.

“The SKA project is a mega-science project and will require the upgrade of infrastructure for science and research. However, the benefits of this upgraded technology and infrastructure will be felt not only by scientists, but by businesses and economies.”

He said the wavelength project and the MOU, demonstrated Seacom’s commitment to continuously elevate Africa’s position as a primary scientific and business destination.

“The timing of this important telecommunications milestone couldn’t be better; it comes in time for inclusion in the SKA site bid submission reports due by the middle of September,” Wallace added.

Construction on the SKA is scheduled to start around 2016, and the announcement of the successful bidder, either South Africa or Australia, is expected by the end of March 2012.”

Engineering News Article

Seacom, a Convergence Partners investee company, has invested R100 million in additional South African infrastructure to meet the continuous high growth in demand for broadband services and applications. The investment includes the purchase of physical optical fibre links from Dark Fibre Africa (DFA) as well as installing the equipment required for Seacom to manage the network linking KwaZulu Natal’s coast where the Seacom marine cable lands to two redundant Points of Presence (PoPs) in Gauteng.

Initially, 100 Gigabit per second (Gb/s) of the fibre will be lit (using current 10 Gb/s technology) and a further 20 waves are expected to be lit within the next 12 months. Ultra-modern transmission technology is being used with 100 Gb/s per wavelength which gives the new link a design capacity of over 8 Terabit per second (Tb/s). This is in line with Seacom’s plans to expand the marine portion of the cable to over 4.8 Tb/s.

This enormous amount of capacity enables Seacom to align current and future customer needs with the explosion in broadband demand driven by a wave of content rich applications such as cloud computing to meet enterprise requirements, HD video streaming and IPTV services. This investment also supports Seacom’s recently launched Internet Protocol (IP) platform that will drive the proliferation of content created in Africa and the regional hosting of international content.

Brian Herlihy, Seacom CEO, said: “South Africa continues to offer tremendous growth opportunities and this investment confirms Seacom’s view that adequate infrastructure  will ensure that the market can absorb new capacity within record time.

“In our continuous quest to improve quality of service, this is one of the many investments that we are making to ensure that we provide our customers with the best possible support  as we continue to build the African Internet based on low-latency, high speed and reliable infrastructure.“

Managed by Seacom and its suppliers, the route is the company’s first co-build of this nature. It will be operated in parallel with Seacom’s existing routes and will provide customers with the benefit of protected services delivered across multiple, physically diverse routes and operated by multiple providers.

Suveer Ramdhani, Seacom’s Head of Product Strategy, said: “This new capacity will benefit the end user by enabling Seacom clients to bring new content rich products to market in a reliable and economical way.

“The scale of the capacity we are making available on the route is yet another first in Africa and you can expect us to continue rolling out more ground-breaking technological developments in the near future.”

Seacom believes in a world where the African Internet experience is characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets. Today, over a dozen countries across the African continent have access to Seacom’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

SEACOM Press Release

Engineering News

MoneyWeb Article

Convergence Partners investee company, Seacom has signed a master services agreement with Telecomunicações de Moçambique (TDM), the leading telecommunications service provider in Mozambique, which gives it access to the largest and most distributed fibre optic network in Mozambique as well as a diverse route into Zimbabwe and additional border presence into Malawi and South Africa.

Through this agreement, customers in Zimbabwe are able to interconnect to the Seacom system in Maputo via Mutare. This additional route through Mozambique complements Seacom’s existing route through South Africa via Beit Bridge and provides Zimbabwean customers with resiliency and redundancy.

Brian Herlihy, Seacom CEO, comments: “This agreement with TDM demonstrates our commitment to partner with established players to improve the range of service to customers while continuously expanding the reach of Seacom’s low cost services into land-locked countries across the region.”

Currently, more than a dozen countries across the African continent have access to Seacom’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

Article in Seacom website

Article in ItOnline

Seventeen years ago Wired published Neal Stephenson’s magisterial epic “Mother Earth Mother Board”, about the web of undersea fibre-optic cables being built to connect all of humanity. Well – almost all. Africa, again, was left behind. Until 2009, all of East Africa could only connect to the Internet over slow and hugely expensive satellite links.

Finally, two years ago, SEACOM, a Convergence Partners investee company, laid a cable along the East African coast to Mumbai; then tributaries were run thousands of kilometers inland, as far as Uganda and even Rwanda; and later this year, a direct connection to Europe will be lit up. A recent article in TechCruch explores some of the inner workings and history of the SEACOM undersea cable.

As noted in the abovementioned article, the entry of SEACOM has chopped the cost of bandwidth from US $5,000 per megabit/s per month to approximately $100, hugely increased capacity to 1.28 terabits/second, and given more than 100 million people (and counting) access to broadband Internet for the very first time.

Landing the cables was the hard part. It took three months to dig, lay, and cover those seven kilometres, using local barges and professional divers. By contrast, the cable that runs to Djibouti along the 1500 kilometres of Somalia’s wild coast was laid in less than a month not counting the 55 days that the ship had to rest in port because of the danger of pirates.

The undersea cable consists of the fibres themselves, as thin as human hairs, wrapped in a copper sheath that carries up to 10,000 DC volts to power the repeaters every 100km that keep the signals comprehensible. In depths less than a kilometre, this is all sheathed in thick additional armour.

SEACOM is a triumph of engineering, and a profoundly important one. In Kenya today, a SIM card costs less than a beer, and a minute of 2G Internet access costs only 2.5 cents. That’s still too much, but far less than in the bad old days.

See attached article

Article in pdf

Less than two years after completing the undersea portion of the first system to connect Southern and Eastern Africa to the rest of the world via India and Europe, Convergence Partners’ investee company SEACOM continues to drive the growth of the African Internet by rolling-out an Internet Protocol, IP, Platform into its international core network.

The IP Platform project involves the design, deployment and operation of nine land-based Internet access points that will store popular web content closer to where the Internet is accessed, thereby enabling a richer and faster Internet browsing experience for end users. Six of these IP network nodes are already live including Dar es Salaam, Johannesburg, Maputo, Marseille, Mombasa and Mtunzini.

SEACOM’s IP platform will allow direct routing between African countries through a single seamless network. As a result, customers are able to reach multiple countries using the shortest path to final destination without Internet traffic being transferred via Europe. Local continuity through direct routing combined with increased resilience through SEACOM’s recent acquisition of east and west coast submarine cable capacity greatly reduces the exposure to data losses in the event of outages elsewhere on the network.

Brian Herlihy, SEACOM CEO, said: “Today, the majority of Internet content consumed in Africa is non-African, flowing from Europe and North America into Africa. We believe that the growth of the African ICT market, including mobile penetration and the eager adoption of social networking, coupled with the development of cloud services will result in a rapid increase in content on African soil.

“In the near future, the rest of the world will be viewing media generated in and stored on the African continent and SEACOM will remain at the forefront of developing the African Internet to support this trend.”

CISCO, Dimension Data and Interoute were closely involved in the design, procurement, logistics and deployment of the SEACOM IP network. This approach of partnering with established players to provide broadband services will continue as SEACOM develops its products and services based on resiliency, service quality and flexibility in line with customers’ evolving needs.

SEACOM truly believes in a world where the African Internet experience is characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets. Today, over a dozen countries across the African continent have access to SEACOM’s low cost products and services via its extended network.

SEACOM Press Release