By Kathy Gibson – Just 10 years ago, Internet connectivity in South Africa – and much of Africa – was very different to what it is today.
Access was expensive and often slow, and the continent was largely isolated from the rest of the world.
But excitement was building about a new solution, the undersea cable that Seacom was building out from Europe, down the east coast of Africa, and landing in South Africa at Mtunzini on the KwaZulu-Natal coast.
Seacom CEO Byron Clatterbuck explains that the Seacom undersea cable, launched on 23 July 2009, was the first non-Telkom cable into South Africa.
The Seacom cable was privately funded by largely African investors, and added 80Gb of capacity to the data-starved African market.
Importantly, Seacom launched as an open access networking, connecting to all ISPs, MNOs and regional telcos.
“As a result, Seacom quickly started carrying the bulk of Internet traffic in the country,” he says.
In 2012, Seacom and other investors invested in the WACS cable, creating a “ring” around Africa and offering fail-safe connectivity. “This also allowed us to grow our data transmission service,” Clatterbuck explains.
As a result, within just a few years, Seacom grew to be Africa’s largest meshed IP network, with the largest peering relationship of all African carriers.
In 2014, the company moved into the corporate space, in South Africa first and later in Kenya and Uganda.
This year, Seacom has invested in more capacity and network diversity, as well as in targeted acquisitions to expedite growth, Clatterbuck says.
The company will continue to look for new acquisitions, as well as value-add services that bolt on to the network, he adds.
Back in 2009 and 2010, if the Internet was slow or down, the Seacom cable was likely to be blamed, and the fact that there was no redundancy meant this was often true, Clatterbuck points out.
But the network today is pretty resilient. Seacom, WACS, TEAMS, EASSy and Main One are all connecting Africa to the world, he says.
Seacom has also started investing in terrestrial fibre across South Africa. “We bought FibreCo, and have started lighting their fibre,” says Clatterbuck.
Nationwide capacity of 1Tbps will soon be available, with additional capacity to be added over time.
The company is also extending its metro fibre network to smaller cities. “We believe this offers additional opportunity for economic growth and the benefits connectivity brings,” Clatterbuck says.
Overall, Seacom has had a good 10 years, he adds. “From where we started with less than 100 customers, we now have 5 000 customers; and we have 30 points of presence.”
The company also boasts 3 500km of long haul fibre and 620 km of metro fibre.
Going forward, Seacom plans to focus more attention on the enterprise market, says Steve Briggs, chief commercial officer.
“Corporates need all the services we offer, and more,” Briggs says. “But it is no longer good enough to have just the speeds and feeds conversation.”
Seacom’s primary business is still based on its connectivity. Today, it has scalable on-net fibre capacity in Gauteng, KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. It is also expanding into the Free State and Eastern Cape on the back of the FibreCo acquisition.
The CloudWorx offering gives Seacom customers an on-ramp to the major cloud service providers. It also offers software-based flexible connectivity to replace MPLS.
No network can be complete without extensive security, and Seacom is offering appliance-based and virtual security to its customers. Part of the security offering is upstream DDoS protection, business ppliation security and remote access security.
For most South African enterprises, the journey to the cloud is a non-negotiable, and Seacom has a number of migration services and business models.
It’s service offering includes on-premise local solution, software as a service, and cloud-based voice and collaboration applications.