Eassy completes final splice By Paul Vecchiatto, ITWeb Cape Town correspondent Johannesburg, 20 Apr 2010 Construction of the East Africa Submarine Cable System (Eassy) was completed yesterday, with the northern and southern halves spliced together at sea early yesterday morning. A statement issued by the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), Eassy's largest shareholder, says the so-called "final splice" took place a few days ahead of schedule, at 4am on Monday. The installation phase of the project, which started in Maputo, Mozambique, in December 2009, was completed on board the cable-laying vessel, Ile de Batz, in the Indian Ocean, just off the east African coast. Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC, says: "Now that this critical stage of the project has been completed successfully and ahead of time, we will start system testing almost immediately. Once this is finalised, we are looking forward to connecting our first customers to the network from July 2010. "At WIOCC, we are also working with our shareholders to deliver high-speed, fibre-optic connectivity, not just to the Eassy landing stations, but deep into the interior of Africa. This will enable us to satisfy the growing customer demand for end-to-end service and provide improved geographic reach." Connectivity to Europe "A key difference between Eassy and other sub-Saharan systems is that our system will deliver connectivity to Europe, via a direct route through the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea," says WIOCC CTO Ryan Sher, chairman of Eassy's Technical Working Group. "Eassy will be the first east coast system to connect directly to Europe, minimising the time taken for traffic from Africa to reach the key Internet peering points in Europe and North America, and vice-versa." Sher says the vast majority of international traffic is IP- and Internet-based, and with most African traffic destined for Europe and the US, where the most popular content and applications are located, the ability to deliver content faster gives Eassy and its customers a competitive edge in the market. "Other east coast systems use longer routes, via the Middle East or India; our optimised routing means that we are able to offer the lowest latency service to our customers," Sher says. James Wekesa, WIOCC's chief commercial officer, says: "At WIOCC, we are offering connectivity from as little as 2Mbps for one month, up to multiple Gbps wavelengths for the lifetime of the system, thereby levelling the playing field for small, medium and large organisations." http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=32376:eassy-completes-final-splice&catid=198&Itemid=69 -- Cheers, McTim "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel