Zimbabwe is poised to benefit from a deal announced yesterday between SEACOM and Telecomunicacoes de Mocambique (TDM), Mozambique’s telecoms parastatal. The company has been granted the go ahead to connect our landlocked country to the undersea cable. This is expected to have a positive impact on corporate and individual consumers in the not too distant future.
A direct link through Mozambique will reduce costs of connection and avail greater bandwidth and reliability to local IAPs and ISPs, supplementing the country’s existing international fibre connections.
TDM will work with SEACOM by contributing its national fibre-optic grid for this purpose. According to a statement released by SEACOM, TDM has allowed the company to link Zimbabweans to the 13 700 KM cable running along the coast. Financial terms of the agreement were not released.
Internet Access Providers expected to immediately benefit from this deal are Africom, PowerTel, and Masawara’s Telerix. These IAPs have invested in laying fibre connecting Zimbabwe and Mozambique through the border city of Mutare.
Africom connected to TDM last year back in September 2010. Telerix (bought by Masawara in January this year), in partnership with state owned operator PowerTel, also has an overhead fibre cable running to Mutare.
Another undersea cable that is redefining Zimbabwe’s telecoms space is the East African Submarine System (EASSy), of which Telone is a shareholder and is connected to (through Mozambique). The continent’s internet bandwidth capacity is witnessing exponential growth as a result of African driven initiatives like SEACOM, EASSY and WACS among others. The country and continent is slowly but surely riding itself on an overdependence on expensive and inconsistent satellite connections. SEACOM is 76.56% African owned.
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“…in the not too distant future.” WTF? Does this mean: (a) distant future (b) near future (c) anytime from now?
We are following up this announcement by SEACOM with more details, look out for it soon. Soon meaning (c) anytime from now.
Africom connected to TDM last year back in September 2011. Telerix (bought by Masawara in January this year), in partnership with state owned operator PowerTel, also has an overhead fibre cable running to Mutare.
Amhanya
Joe Black, which service provider are you with? And how are the connection speeds, etc?
this makes me love my country more
Africom connected to TDM last year back in September 2011. Telerix (bought by Masawara in January this year), in partnership with state owned operator PowerTel, also has an overhead fibre cable running to Mutare.
september 2010, september 2011 hatisati tasvika. lol
Thank you very much for the correction. lol x 2
mmm when oh when will we see these improvements from yet another new fiber connection…Price really doesn’t bother me (Im on powertel) but the consistency of their service worries me. One day, I was able to download an 800mb movie in about 7hours (avg speed was 550kb/s peaking at the odd 1mb/s). Then the next day it took a smaller movie 700mb 18hours!!!So I hope this cable will bring some added bandwidth to the starved networks because at the moment surfing is joyous one moment and the next its unbearable! And the good thing about our connectivity gadgets in Zim is that they are capable of going really fast if the ISP’s really push to provide us with a betteer service. I roughly estimate that the the Africom and Powertel modems can peak upto 3mb/s speeds and the econet HSDPA 7mb/s if all the networks were in put into better running capacity with the now seemingly abundant and redundant supply of fiber.
i think we should wait and see this is surely good news, it was good news when Powertel announced the Botswana deal but surely the speeds are still bad though improved..
Guys download speed also depend with many factors other than your ISP, Zim wireless speeds are more the same as in other countries around the world.
i have come to notice abit of high latency im not sure how your NOC runs but which speed test site do you recommend and traceroutes to website are unsucessfull sometimes please also advise on the 8.8.8.8 google dns sometimes i ping them and get no reponse i would also like to know my subnet type and if it is possible to setup a VPn network on this platform if i was to but dedicated bandwith