While the arrival of the Seacom undersea cable is great news for international bandwidth starved South Africa, the launch on Thursday at Neotel’s Midrand data centre was more damp squib than monumental occasion.
While guests and the media watched a video from Tanzania, where Seacom CEO Brian Herlihy and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete officially launched East Africa’s first undersea cable, techies sat glued to their laptops testing upload and download speeds and trying to one-up each other with Twitter tweets.
Tech journalists, bloggers and Twitter users provided a running commentary on the proceedings and most chose to focus on the high-speed services that Seacom will deliver to South Africa, which is appropriate because that’s where the real story of Seacom lies, especially for South Africa.
For years, South Africa has been held to ransom by Telkom and its monopoly over Africa’s only undersea cable, Sat-3.
‘We, as the Shanduka group, are proud to be involved in this project.”
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