SEACOM lights up N1 route, increasing capacity and expanding national connectivity

SEACOM enhances its national high capacity fibre network with the rollout of services along the N1 connecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein and Cape Town as a first phase of its national rollout, following the acquisition of FibreCo earlier this year. Additional capacity will be added to other key national routes interconnecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, East London and Kimberly in the next phase of the rollout.

As one of the pioneers of introducing sub-sea capacity to the continent, the next step of the journey for SEACOM is to ensure that the increased capacity can reach beyond the major hubs and into many of the smaller metros across South Africa.

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. This enables fully redundant high-speed ring protection for diversity around the African continent.

Customers can 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. This will enable the provision of competitive business connectivity solution to these towns which, in the past, had limited access to high capacity Internet and cloud service options. The second phase of the N1 Light Up project will see additional towns connected along the route.

High-speed, high capacity networks are critical to the future of the world’s Internet and the digital economy. “Our continued investment in open access infrastructure enables us to respond to the growing needs of our customers,” says Byron Clatterbuck, SEACOM CEO. “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.”

Clatterbuck continues, “Customers can leverage SEACOM’s state-of-the-art DWDM network which provides multi-terabit connectivity between the key data centres and to the cable landing stations. Lighting up additional fibre across South Africa also allows SEACOM to deliver affordable, high-speed Internet connectivity and cloud services to traditionally underserved mid-tier cities and towns along our routes”.

SEACOM’s network is designed for emerging technologies and is completely future-proofed for gigabit and terabit Internet needs. Spanning over 4,000 km, consisting of underground fibre routes, high-speed optical equipment, carrier-grade Ethernet equipment and hosting facilities interconnecting over 60 points of presence country-wide.

SEACOM continues to strengthen its existing telecommunications network in the country, with increased capacity, protected NLD routes and town connectivity with the ability to offer a wide range of business solution, which in turn, enhances the country’s ability to leverage advances in information and communications technologies.