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.

Pixelsebi has taken a closer look at the South African blogosphere the last days. And there I have learned about the awesome website amatomu, which is done by the South African news site Mai l& Guardian online. Amatomu provides you with tons of informations about the south african blogosphere. You have a huge directory of round about 2400 weblogs, sorted by different categories. Pixelsebis analysis found out, that the majority of the blog traffic is based on sport related topics, (massively by rugby). He writes:

„For me it’s really interesting to see, that the Mail&Guardian seems to drive the South African blogosphere quite strongly, not only by creating amatomu, which claims to generate 10% of the total SA blog traffic, but also by being present with two popular top blogs. Even if also German publishing houses have started their own blogs, none of them plays such an active role within the blogosphere, like the Mail&Guardian seems to play in South Africa.“

The analysis shows, that Africa is strong in Web 2.0:

The top blog in South Africa, adii, has a Technorati rank of 1288 and the German top blog, Basic Thinking, has a Technorati rank of 1896 – therefore the quantity of discussions within the blogosphere about what other blogs are writing seems to be pretty equal, regarding the top blogs.

„We are five years behind US and Europe“, the first South African multimedia news paper maker said. „But we definitely catching on“. An interview that took place between Colin Daniels, former New Media Strategy Manager at The Times and Mandlakazi Mpahlwa, host of the Kaleidoscope show at CNBCAfrica:

LegalView.com recently reported on its mesothelioma blog (which is written by specialised lawyers) the ban of asbestos in South Africa. The Environmental Affairs and Tourism Minister there announced the ban with regards to the use, manufacture and processing of asbestos, which causes a deadly form of lung cancer known as mesothelioma.

The South African ban marks the latest addition to a worldwide effort to ban the mineral said the law firm. Currently, approximately 50 countries around the globe have prohibited the production of the contaminant. For years, asbestos was mined in the area and, according to news reports, accounted for 3 percent of the value of all of the area’s minerals.