Whispers of the SEACOM Cable & More

Whispers of the SEACOM Cable

I first caught wind that fiber would be landing in East Africa through local tech blogs, such as Moses Kemibaro’s blog (an excellent tech blog, by the way!).

With bloggers being a more technically inclined lot than most, the East African blogosphere was awash with posts relating to this much awaited event.

Personally, although I was happy to hear that I had reason to hope for faster, cheaper Internet connectivity in the near future, I had my doubts about how long it would take for the expected benefits of the SEACOM cable to trickle down to the everyday Internet user.

After living in East Africa for 9 years, I wasn’t holding my breath.

What Is Seacom?

On July 23, 2009, marked by great fanfare across East and Southern Africa, the first fiber optic submarine cable system to serve Africa’s eastern seaboard, SEACOM, went live.

A 15,000 km cable network connecting France, Egypt, Djibouti, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, and India, the SEACOM cable system seemed to many “the dawn of a new era for communications between the continent and the rest of the world” given its designed capacity of 1.28 terabits per second (see the SEACOM cable map here).

SEACOM’s launch date came and went without much notice from me, since my Tanzania Telecommunications Ltd. (TTCL) home Internet connection seemed the same as always. (In hindsight, though, I should be truthful and say it became a little faster shortly after this).

Whatever the case, as I said earlier, I wasn’t holding my breath anyway.

Trickling Down to the End User

Then, on October 3, 2009, I woke up to find a press release in a local newspaper. Well, I didn’t find it, but someone pointed it out to me. 🙂

The press release said that my ISP was finally rolling out the benefits of the SEACOM cable on to its customers.

Wow, so soon? I had to find out more.

Upon contacting my ISP, I found out that the cost of my Internet service had instantly dropped by 20%.

Although this was a good start, my internet connection was still pricey.

What I wanted was a fast service that granted me unlimited Internet usage for an affordable monthly flat fee.

The best that my ISP could offer was either a very fast, less expensive (than I was already paying), pay-per-use package, or a slower, unlimited-usage, flat-fee monthly package that would cost me about a third of my household’s cumulative Internet expenditure.

The members of my household and I opted to try out TTCL’s unlimited broadband service.

TTCL’s Unlimited Broadband Service

At first, the new slower speed of my Internet connection drove me crazy.

For quite a while, I threatened to anyone who was willing to listen that I would revert to the older, more expensive—though faster—service that I’d been using.

After dusting off my tabbed browsing skills, though, I learned to deal with the slower speed and started to enjoy the fact that I could spend as much time as I wanted on the Internet, whenever I wanted, without having to think about how data-intensive some online activities can be (think: Facebook, video, and downloading applications).

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