Seacom lights up more towns on N1 route

Seacom has “lit up” more towns along the N1 route between Johannesburg and Cape Town with fibre broadband options, the telecommunications company said on Thursday.

In the initial phase of the roll-out, Bloemfontein and Worcester will immediately benefit from 100Gbit/s connectivity speeds, with Colesberg, Beaufort West, Laingsburg and Touswriver connecting at 10Gbit/s, it said.

“This will enable the provision of competitive business connectivity solutions to these towns, which, in the past, had limited access to high-capacity Internet and cloud service options,” Seacom said in a statement. “The second phase of the N1 ‘Light Up’ project will see additional towns connected along the route.”

The connection of the smaller towns follows Seacom’s acquisition earlier this year of FibreCo, which built a long-distance fibre route along the N1.

“Additional capacity will be added to other key national routes interconnecting Johannesburg, Bloemfontein, Durban, East London and Kimberley in the next phase of the roll-out,” the company said.

“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.”

‘Express routes’

Seacom will offer 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.

“This increases our open-access redundant capacity to the existing connectivity making the multiple terabits-per-second of Internet connectivity from the subsea cables more resilient,” said Seacom CEO Byron Clatterbuck.

“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.” — © 2019 NewsCentral Media