JOHANNESBURG - Cable company Seacom on Thursday announced it had rolled out services along the N1 connecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein and Cape Town in its first phase of its national rollout, which would provide high capacity Internet and cloud service options.
"These towns which, in the past, had limited access to high capacity Internet and cloud service options," it said.
The move follows the acquisition of fibre provider FibreCo, which owns and operates a national fibre network providing infrastructure and connectivity services across South Africa, earlier this year
Seacom previously had capacity from Durban up to Johannesburg.
Additional capacity would be added to other key national routes interconnecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, East London and Kimberly in the next phase of the rollout.
"The N1 route traverses the spine of South Africa and has become the backbone for both current and future undersea cable systems, which land on the East and West Coasts, and connect major public cloud providers to the country’s major metros, " it said.
Seacom, which is privately owned and operated, said customers could benefit from a range of options, including end to end ‘express routes’ connecting major metros to major data centres, national long-distance services, as well as last-mile metro and town connectivity.
"Upon initial activation, Bloemfontein and Worcester will immediately benefit from 100Gbps connectivity speeds, with Colesberg, Beaufort West, Laingsburg and Touswriver connecting at 10Gbps. "
Looking ahead, Seacom said the second phase of the N1 Light Up project would see additional towns connected along the route.
“Our continued investment in open access infrastructure enables us to respond to the growing needs of our customers,” said Byron Clatterbuck, the chief executive of Seacom.
“This increases our open access redundant capacity to the existing connectivity making the multiple Terabits-per-second (Tbps) of Internet connectivity from the subsea cables more resilient.”