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EXCLUSIVE: Interview with SEACOM CEO

By , Editor, ITWeb Africa
Africa , 16 Aug 2012

EXCLUSIVE: Interview with SEACOM CEO

Three years after wholesale broadband services provider SEACOM landed its undersea broadband cable along Africa’s eastern coastline, the company is diversifying its business into offering network and possibly even cloud computing services.

This is according to the chief executive of SEACOM, Mark Simpson, speaking to ITWeb Africa in an exclusive interview.

SEACOM, which is a privately owned company with five shareholders - including the likes of Remgro Limited and Industrial Promotion Services - completed the landing of its undersea high-speed broadband cable along Africa’s East Coast in 2009. Subsequently, the company says the availability of international bandwidth in countries such as South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania has increased “ten-fold”.

The landing of the SEACOM cable has also been followed by the establishment of other undersea cables, such as the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (Eassy) and the West African Cable System (WACS). Talk of a ‘BRICS’ undersea broadband cable - connecting Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - has emerged this year as well, with Google being touted as a potential investor.

And in this burgeoning undersea broadband cable industry, Simpson says his business has experienced 10% per annum growth, while recording $150 million in revenue.

But he adds that SEACOM is shifting its focus towards offering other services, in addition to wholesale broadband.

“You could sit at the beach and sort of wait for people to come to you. But I think that’s not the right business model. It’s very much about becoming much more of a network player.

“We’ve seen within the company quite a transition, which is still ongoing, from being a build-it, project-oriented company now to an operating telco, and starting to roll-out new services and products,” he says.

“We’re doing a lot more ethernet connectivity; we’ve been investing quite a bit in our IP network,” he adds.

SEACOM has also established a subsidiary called Pamoja, which could build cloud computing infrastructure in Africa. Plans are in place for Pamoja to introduce offerings such as platform as a service, infrastructure as a service and software as a service.

“It’s still in proof-of-concept stage, but we’ve invested a fair bit already, putting about another $1 million into infrastructure in Kenya and South Africa,” says Simpson.

He adds that the rationale behind setting up a cloud computing service is to help Africans produce their own content, such as mobile applications, that can be accessed by those on the continent and the rest of the world.

“When SEACOM first arrived, it was about basically connecting Africa to the rest of the world to get that content and bring it back - it’s a long way to go.”

“But increasingly it’s going to be about African content,” he says.

The wholesale bandwidth provider has faced challenges though, as the inland terrestrial fibre links connecting cables such as SEACOM to cities and towns in Africa have been slow to materialise.

“There’s certainly not an oversupply of terrestrial networks. We haven’t got anywhere near I think satisfying all the potential demand that exists today, let alone that will exist in the future.”

“As much as we say the bottleneck in capacity has moved to the terrestrial market, I think some of the quality service issues certainly rest there as well in terms of getting resilience into the backhaul networks, getting diversity and having ring-networks, which we can do in some places, but can’t everywhere.”

South Africa’s Telkom and undersea cable breakages

South Africa’s fixed line operator Telkom has faced a number of woes of late, after the country’s Competition Tribunal last week fined it $55 million for 'bullying' its competitors in a market abuse case stretching back to 2004.

Furthermore, the South African government’s dismissal of a Korea Telecom (KT) investment in the struggling telco this year, and talk about the ANC-led administration considering delisting the operator from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) has also dogged the fixed-line unit.

But Simpson says Telkom still holds value in South Africa.

“I think Telkom is an asset for South Africa, whoever’s owning it.

“It’s critical; you need a strong domestic terrestrial network. You also need that supported by lots of other players as well. Obviously, a monopoly doesn’t work and we don’t have a monopoly. We may not have the open market that a lot of us would like to have... .But I think Telkom does a pretty good job with the services they provide. Certainly, I think there’s a lot more assets there that we’d like to see coming to the market more readily.”

Regarding cable cuts such as those on Eassy’s system in February this year between Djibouti and Port Sudan, Simpson says it’s inevitable that breakages happen.

“What we’re all doing, and what we’re encouraging our customers to do is to have diversity, and certainly with the number of cable systems we’ve got nowadays, as customers are growing, they’re taking that diversity,”

“We cooperate with each other. As much as we compete, we also cooperate.”

Listen to the full interview:


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