Posted on Thursday, July 15, 2010 at 10:07

South Africa's third undersea fiber optic cable EASSy is set to go live on Friday (16th July 2010) joining the newer SEACOM and original SAT3/SAFE cables terminating in South Africa.

The EASSy cable should bring much needed redundancy, which as displayed by the current SEACOM cable outage is necessary.

A lot of the independent ISP's consumer customers who were utilizing the cheaper SEACOM bandwidth were left without international connectivity on Monday 5th July 2010. Due to the high cost of SAT3/SAFE bandwidth most ISP's did not have redundant connections in place at the time and had to negotiate expensive emergency backup through other isp's and organizations.

Most isp's expect the pricing of EASSy bandwidth to be cheaper than what is available on SEACOM, which should allow them to invest in backup links in case of failure on either cable systems in South Africa.

EASSy is designed with a final capacity of 1.4 Tbps (1433.6 Gbps), which is slightly more than SEACOM's 1.2 Tbps (1228.8) and many times larger than SAT3/SAFE's (120/130 Gbps).

For the man in the street, all this extra international bandwidth should bring prices down somewhat - but the expensive local bandwidth costs to bring the bandwidth to your door is still terribly expensive. In most cases it now costs less for a full transit connection from Johannesburg to London than Johannesburg to Cape Town.

The situation should improve as hundreds of newly licensed I-ECNS providers  start offering services across the fiber networks being built.