EA has to wait longer for Seacom, Teams cables

East Africa will have to wait a little longer to be connected to the global broadband network due to pirate attacks off the Horn of Africa and Somalia that have delayed the laying of the undersea cable there.

The connection to the global broadband network was supposed to have taken place by the end of this month but on Wednesday the managers of Seacom, a $600 million project owned by private investors, said that its cable would not come into service until July 23 – nearly a month later than planned – due to piracy off the coast of Somalia that had delayed the work of its cable-laying contractor.

Tyco Telecommunications, the contractor, was at one point forced to suspend its cable-laying around the Horn of Africa so it could revise its security arrangements following the latest surge in piracy, the Financial Times reported.

Piracy from Somalia has been on the rise since last August, but last week’s announcement from Seacom marked the first time the pirates have disrupted efforts to end the region’s dependence on satellite Internet links, which are slow, unreliable and often prohibitively expensive.

While cable-laying ships have not been attacked so far, they are huge – needing to carry up to 6,000km of fibre optic cable – and vulnerable to pirate attack because they move slowly.

“Cable-laying ships would be prime targets,” said Pottengal Mukundan, director of the International Maritime Bureau in London. “They’re very slow when they’re laying the cables and they really can’t get away.”

The delay had not been announced until the job was finished to avoid putting the ships in further danger.

The Seacom cable will link South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia to India and Europe. A separate project led by the Kenyan government — the East African Marine System — will connect Kenya to the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, the recent commissioning of the $110 million East African Marine System cable by President Mwai Kibaki in Mombasa has brought to the fore the battles the government-led outfit is willing to engage its main rival, Seacom — a privately-owned fibre optic cable services operator.

Apparently, the East African Marine System (Teams) ship had docked at Mombasa port to complete the final stage.

Seacom pulled a similar stunt two months ago when its ship docked in Mombasa, sending the media into a frenzy: That the first-ever under sea cable had landed on the East African coast.

The ship, which had come from South Africa was part of a three-ship crew laying the $760 million cable that will eventually connect the East African region with India and Europe.

This is all hype and no action,according to industry insiders.

It is naive to expect a ship that started laying the cable slightly over a month ago in Fujaira, United Arabs Emirates, 5,000 kilometers away, to complete the work in a few days time, observed Ng’ang’a Waruinge, an IT consultant with Wired TeleKom.

Notwithstanding the rerouting of the cable by an extra 200 kilometres from the coastline for fear of pirates off the Somalia coast.