SEACOM is a privately funded venture that sells international capacity to global networks via India and Europe, since launching operations in July 2009.
SEACOM is the first company to offer broadband services to countries in East Africa and has its landing point already installed in Djibouti.
The agreement was signed after negotiations with SEACOM; SEMEW 3, with cable from Southeast Asia to Europe; TEAM, from Kenya to Dubai; and the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy), with landing points in six countries, from Mtunzini in South Africa to Port Sudan (9,900km).
The project will enable Ethiopia to connect its domestic networks of fibre optics (believed to have surpassed 10,000km and extended to the border with Djibouti) to an undersea cable system they have brought to the shores of the Red Sea, a.k.a. the cable landing point.
The state owned telecom monopoly, the ETC, has been providing data and voice services largely connected via a very expensive and slow satellite connection, operated by Hughes International. There is also a low capacity bandwidth connection via Port Sudan.
The new network, however, is expected to provide a cheaper and much faster bandwidth connection rate.
South Africa, Madagascar, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Kenya are interconnected via a protected ring structure on the continent. A second express fibre optic cable pair connects South Africa to Kenya. These two pairs have a combined designed capacity of 1.28TB (terabytes) per second, of which 100GB per second is currently active, the company claims on its website.
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