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The company said it has also added to the resilience of its wholesale offer through deals with other network operators on both east and west coasts of the continent.
“This latest development is integral to the continued development of the SEACOM network in Africa, in particular to countries that have had limited access to broadband connectivity,” said Suveer Ramdhani, the operator’s head of product strategy. “This is part of SEACOM’s objective to build the African internet.”
He said the aim of the company was to stimulate conditions favourable to the development of “abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds and interconnected African markets.”
On the west coast of Africa, the MainOne cable system, which opened for business in summer 2010, has said it will use Cisco’s Internet Protocol Next-Generation Network (IP NGN) product to help meet demand for high-bandwidth network capacity among wholesale, government and enterprise customers.
MainOne said Cisco will be a partner in the development of IP-based network and application services and in the creation of a content-delivery highway for private and public communications networks.
Funke Opeke, CEO of MainOne, said the aim is to develop value-added services in a number of areas such as VPN, VoIP, IPTV and advanced collaborative platforms.
“We want to accelerate the deployment of broadband across West Africa,” she said. “The market is demanding more sophisticated services.” MainOne links west Africa to Europe with landing stations in Nigeria and Ghana, and branching units in Morocco and the Canary Islands.
