SEACOM has signed a contract with Interoute to connect its 17,000 kilometre intercontinental submarine fibre optic network to Interoute’s pan-European fibre optic network, providing East Africa with access to major business centres in Europe and throughout the rest of the world, plus Interoute’s range of innovative wholesale and enterprise services.

East Africa has seen a phenomenal increase in demand for Internet connectivity, with users rising by 1062% from 2000 to 2008 (Source: Internet World Stats).

The development of telecoms in East Africa has been restricted owing to its dependence on low capacity expensive satellite based connectivity. which suffered from quality issues and increased round trip delay not suitable for large streams of rich multimedia content The new subsea cable will radically change the economics of high capacity bandwidth for the East African telecoms industry, enabling businesses to get more capacity for less cost, and at a higher quality.

SEACOM’s new fibre optic cable will run along the east coast of Africa, creating a digital super highway that links South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya with Europe and South Asia. The cable will extend to Marseilles, where it will connect to Interoute’s network providing a speed of light route to Europe, North America and the Middle East. The new subsea cable is scheduled for service in June 2009, and will offer 1.28 Tera-Bits Per Second of capacity, the equivalent of streaming approximately 1,600,000 simultaneous YouTube videos and will enable high definition TV, peer to peer networks, and IPTV, as well as supporting surging Internet demand.