EASSy cable entry to up competition

By Macharia Kamau

The third undersea fibre optic cable to Kenya will be commercially available to service providers at the end of this week.

The East Africa Submarine System (EASSy) is expected to go live on Friday, and will diversify cable systems and increase competition in undersea connectivity to the region, and further bring down Internet costs.

The cable is also expected to compliment the existing networks and bring much needed resilience to the networks of telecoms operators.

Currently, Kenya is served by the East African Marine System (TEAMS) and Seacom, which have in the past shown the facilities are vulnerable to failure, and seen businesses suffer losses due to prolonged connectivity downtimes.

Diversity and security

EASSy, which has nine landing stations along the Eastern Africa coastline, stretching from Sudan to South Africa, landed in Mombasa in late March.

"Multiple submarine cable systems bring diversity and security for customer traffic, so all systems TEAMS, Seacom and EASSy, will have a role to play in East, Central and Southern Africa," said Chris Wood Chief Executive West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), the firm that lay and manages the cable.

"EASSy will be the first East Coast system to connect on a direct route to Europe, making it the lowest latency system for traffic to key Internet peering points in Europe and North America. Other systems use a longer path to reach Europe, through connections in either India or UAE," he added.

The cable is in nine African countries, and will offer transit connectivity through backhaul networks to at least 12 landlocked countries, providing the greatest geographic coverage of any system in the region.

The 10,000 kilometre cable cost $263 million (Sh21 billion) to put up and has a capacity of 1.4 terabits per second, making it the largest submarine cable system serving the African continent.