SEACOM launched Africa’s first broadband submarine cable system along the continent’s Eastern and Southern coasts in 2009. SEACOM is privately owned and operated.
Through third-party networks in Europe, SEACOM also delivers these services to other locations in Europe not covered in the list of cities above. The SEACOM cable is deployed with a mixture of double armour cable, single armour cable, special protection cable, and lightweight cable without armour, used in deep waters. Shallower water cable typically has more protective armour than offshore, deeper cable. The cable is a loose tube design that determines the amount and relative location along the transmission path of each type of fibre. Multiple fibre types are used in the cable: dispersion-shifted and non-zero dispersion-shifted. The repeaters are optical amplifier repeaters, using erbium-doped amplifiers. There are over 150 repeaters in the SEACOM system. They are spaced along the cable many tens of kilometres apart with the distance between repeaters varying depending on the segment in the system. Repeater spacing is determined by a variety of factors, including the transmission capacity of the fibres in the cable and the distance between cable landing points. On 23 July 2009, the cable began operations, providing the eastern and southern African countries of Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa with high-speed Internet connectivity to Europe and Asia. The cable was officially switched on in simultaneous events held across the region, in Mombasa, Kenya, and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania.
Project funding
SEACOM is privately-funded, and approximately 75% African-owned. Initial private investment in the SEACOM project was US$375 million: $75 million from the developers, $150 million from private South African investors, and $75 million as a commercial loan from Nedbank. The remaining $75 million was provided by Industrial Promotion Services, which is the industrial and infrastructure arm of the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development. The IPS investment was funded by $15 million in equity, and a total of $60.4 million in debt from the Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund and the FMO. Current ownership structure is as follows: 30% IPS, 30% Remgro, 15% Sanlam, 15% Convergence Partners, and 10% by Brian Herlihy. The cable is variously described as a $600 and a $650 million project, and has seen a number of upgrades to landing station infrastructure, national backhaul and increases to carrying capacity, with an increase to 2.6 terabits per second in May 2012, and then to 12 Tbit/s in 2014.
