In cooperation with the East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) consortium, Alcatel-Lucent plans to provide regional bandwidth capacity of 1.4 Terabit/s via a combined submarine and terrestrial optical solution.
The company says the bandwidth will be enough to "satisfy broadband needs for years to come."
According to the announcement:
The EASSy submarine cable network will provide connectivity across the continent to support the increase in local traffic from both traditional and new broadband services. Additionally, with interconnection to other submarine cable systems to the North and South, this project will provide an international gateway, crucial for the economic development of the region and for the reduction of the digital divide.
The submarine network will span nearly 10,000 km linking eight countries from Sudan to South Africa, via Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Madagascar and Mozambique.
Alcatel-Lucent is a major proponent of ensuring that developing territories the world over have access to broadband.
In a recent paper titled Broadband Policy Guidelines in High-Growth Economies, the company explained the potential of broadband and how its availability can play a transformative role in the development of a region
Broadband's potential can be used as a key driver for economic growth, attracting foreign investment, developing territory attractiveness, and enabling a thriving community. Yet barriers to broadband mass adoption such as affordability, accessibility, awareness, and literacy still prevail.
Broadband is not just the Internet made faster. The definition of broadband is a matter of semantics; what should be emphasized is the deployment of a technology that supports sufficient bandwidth connections to the Internet for the service intended. It provides the ability to support many applications on the same, always-on, access line: from voice to data, from sound to video, from wireline to wireless, and from location-based to global communication services.
The paper points out that there is still some distance to cover before broadband is ubiquitous, affordable, and accessible, and that would-be beneficiaries are educated on its benefits and literate in the ways of leveraging its full potential.
Still it's encouraging to see partnerships like that with EASSy to further deploy access to bandwidth starved areas thus moving ever closer to truly ubiquitous broadband deployment.
