SEACOM - how will consumers benefit, and more particularly, when will they?

Previously, all our international bandwidth used to be transported over another international cable, which had the data capacity of about 130Gbs. SEACOM will provide an alternate cable to these ISPs which have the capacity to carry about 10 times the amount of data per second as our current provider does, at a speed of 1.28Tbs (thats a lot!).

So with this additional competition, ISPs will have the freedom of choice, instead of being tied into a monopoly. Competition will therefore affect pricing and we will see a drop in price as more and more ISPs begin to shift over to SEACOM, creating a competitive market to supply bandwidth to ISPs. - dchetty.co.za

SHOOT: Chetty goes on to say it will take a while to phase in all these changes, so don't hold your breath. Glad I bought my broadbank contract with Altech. By the time those 2 years are up maybe SOMETHING will be ready.

Imagine a converged service of 1000 TV channels of which 350 of them are in Full HD, Unlimited phone and uncapped internet acces through a 50MBs line to your home. This is what the CEO of SEACOM has at his apartment in New York, and its his mission to make it a reality in Africa. - dchetty.co.za

clipped from dchetty.co.za SEACOM’s CEO says that pricing has the capacity to reduce as much as 50% of the current consumer prices that we pay for access to the internet. My opinion is that while this is true, I do not foresee this actually filtering down to teh consumers as aggressively as this. I predict upto 25% price reduction to consumer for data charges within the next year. The speed is however an altogether different story. The speed that consumers receive its bandwidth is limited by the capacity of the LOCAL networks. So if Telkom’s infrastructure can feed us access at a speed of 4MBs, that is the max speed that consumers would be able to receive data. Local network capacity is what limits South African consumers from 50MBs fixed line broadband connectivity to the home. Only until local network capacity has been improved, will the true effect of the speed implications of the SEACOM cable be passed onto consumers.