Estate Living Magazine Smart Moves - Issue 38 February 2019 | Page 51

L i v E
Global infrastructure
Describing the global fibre infrastructure is a moving target because
new cables are constantly being laid at quite a rapid rate, and older
cables are being mothballed, but it is estimated that there are about
450 individual undersea cables in the world, with a total length of
well over a million kilometres. There are – at present – five undersea
cables linking South Africa to Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
These are:
• EASSy (Eastern African Submarine System) from Mtunzini up the
east coast of Africa with a detour to Madagascar, then through
the Red Sea to Sudan.
• WACS (West African Cable System) from Melkbosstrand to
Portugal via the west coast of Africa.
• Seacom from Mtunzini up the east coast of Africa and the Red
Sea to Egypt, and across to India.
• SAFE (Southern Africa–Far East) from Melkbosstrand to Mtunzini
and then out into the Indian Ocean to Mauritius and Réunion,
India and Malaysia.
• SAT3 from Melkbosstrand to Portugal along the west coast of
Africa. Until Seacom went live in 2009, this was the only undersea
connection South Africa had with the rest of the world, which
meant that, if the cable was damaged, we were pretty much cut
off until it had been fixed.
There are, at present, no direct links from South Africa across the
Atlantic, but that is changing. Planned and almost completed trans-
Atlantic routes include:
• SACS (South Atlantic Cable System) from Sanjango in Angola to
Fortaleza in Brazil. The cable has been laid, but it is not yet active.
S M A R T
• SABR, which will run from Cape Town to Recife in Brazil and also
link up St Helena and Ascension, is in the planning stages.
Both of these will connect seamlessly with the USA via one or more
of the many cables linking South and North America.
National infrastructure
From the two main hubs – Mtunzini and Melkbosstrand – long-
distance backhaul cables connect all the major cities, usually closely
following the national roads. At present these are installed, owned
and operated by a few big players, such as Dark Fibre Africa (DFA),
Telkom, Liquid and FibreCo. These, in turn, lease fibre capacity to a
number of operators, such as the mobile operators, e.g. MTN, and
major ISP providers like MWeb, Vox and/or Vumatel.
These terminate in aggregation POPs (point of presence), which
are usually – but not in every case – open access. Larger cities have
multiple POPs while smaller ones and some isolated towns may
have only one. There are a number of players that connect the POPs
to each other – both within and between cities – thereby forming a
core backbone network.
Metro infrastructure
Some ISPs would procure the various elements of the network
separately, and manage each of them, while others buy bundled
services from a POP on the network of a larger upstream wholesale
provider. These service providers then build networks connecting
the POPs with smaller aggregation nodes, which in turn will be
connected in a pattern that actually does resemble a spider web.
And the last mile that gets the magic of fibre to your home will be
connected to one of the aggregation nodes or the fibres connecting
them.
As an estate, your options depend on how close you are to existing
networks, so – in future editions – we will unpack the options
available for the last mile.
Jen Stern
O