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afrol.com, 6 November - With less than 13 months to go before the official switch-on date, work on Africa's most innovative undersea fibre optic cable system to date today moved a significant step forward with the shore-end landing of the South Africa-Far East (SAFE) cable at Melkbosstrand in Cape Town. "Today is a dream coming together, not just for South Africa, but for Africa at large. Telkom has been driving the $630 million SAT-3/WASC/SAFE project for the past four years and the start of the installation process today is a significant milestone. Once complete, the cable will boost South Africa's international connectivity by up to 120 times," said Telkom's Managing The mammoth project will link 15 Countries with 16 landings, and will establish a new global East to West route linking the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa in the process. It will bring state-of-the-art global connectivity for the first time to several African countries, which is a key prerequisite for investment into Africa and for business wishing to set up operations in Africa. Telkom has committed US$100 million to the project, and contracts for the supply and implementation are in force. The complete 28,000-kilometre route has been surveyed, and manufacturing of the cabling and equipment is fast nearing completion, paving the way for marine installation to begin. In preparation for today's cable landing, the Melkbosstrand landing station was upgraded at a cost of R16 million, and trebled in size to accommodate both segments of the cable. At Mtunzini near Richard's Bay - the cable's second landing point in South Africa - construction of a new landing station started in June this year and the shore-end landing is expected to take place there during the course of next week. Telkom is one of 42 telecommunications operators from 35 countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia and the US that have joined forces to fund, build and operate the cable that is due to go into commercial operation in December next year. The project consists of two segments. One is the SAFE segment - a 13 800-kilometre link from South Africa to Malaysia, with intermediate landings in Reunion, Mauritius and India. It will have a capacity of up to 80 Gigabit/s. The second is a 15 000-kilometre link between South Africa and Europe, with landings at 10 West and Southern African countries. This link will have the capacity to handle a total of 120 Gigabit/s of information between terminals, equal to 7.3 Million telephone calls, 1.5 Million 64kb/s data channels or 12,000 digital (8Mbits) television channels. The South Africa-Far East link is slightly ahead in terms of preparation. All 234 undersea repeaters and 6 branching units have already been manufactured, along with more than 50% of the 13 800-kilometre cable. The marine installation that began today should be completed by March 2001. "The cable is expected to cater for Africa's communication needs for about 25 years. Current forecasts indicate that international telecommunications traffic to and from Africa will grow nearly sixty times in the next five years. "Apart from providing African countries direct access to each other, as well as increased access to global markets, an additional advantage is that the system will be owned, controlled and maintained by the individual African operators. This means that revenue generated by these operators will remain in Africa. It is currently estimated that Sub-Saharan Africa loses approximately US$300 million of revenue from inter-Africa traffic because of our current dependence on foreign operators to route international traffic," said Ms Moholi.
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