CamTel, Cameroon’s state-owned incumbent telecoms operator, has announced that negotiations are underway to connect neighbouring Central African Republic to its fibre-optic backbone, following fruitful discussions at the November 2013 International Telecommunications (ITU) Summit, in Bangkok. Further, CamTel has indicated that plans are at an ‘advanced’ stage for the construction of a submarine cable link from the seaport of Kribi to Fortaleza in Brazil, as part of efforts to decrease the country’s reliance on existing submarine cable routes. Going forward, the Cameroon government seeks to position the west African country as a regional connectivity hub. In this vein, work is underway to deploy a link between Kribi and Nigeria, where CamTel hopes to link to the 14,000km Main One cable system.
Submarine cable builder SubPartners has revealed that it will land its APX-West and APX-Central cables in NextDC’s Perth P1 data centre. The 5,300km APX-Central cable will connect Perth and Sydney from the third quarter of 2016, with additional spurs planned for Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart. Meanwhile, the 4,700km APX-West cable will connect Perth to Changi North in Singapore, with planned branches to Jakarta, Indonesia and Christmas Island. This too is scheduled to become operational in 3Q16. Both cables have an initial design capacity of 32TBps over four pairs of fibre-optic strands.
Colombia’s UNE EPM Telecomunicaciones has deployed a 100Gbps core using the Alcatel-Lucent 1830 Photonic Service Switch (PSS). The dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM)/optical transport network (OTN) network includes the main fibre rings in Colombia’s national backbone network, which connect submarine landing points in Cartagena, Barranquilla and Tolu to major cities including Bogota, Medellin, Bucaramanga, Cucuta, Cali, Ibague, Neiva and Popayan. The network deployment has been divided into three phases: the first phase was deployed in December of 2013, and the second and third were completed in June this year.
The government of Botswana is to implement a new five-year plan, dubbed the Draft National Broadband Strategy (DBNS), to improve internet access in rural areas. A report from Ventures Africa quotes Assistant Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Olebile Gaborone, who noted that the country has already invested heavily in the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) and West Africa Cable System (WACS) undersea cables.
Venture capital-backed Zayo Group, a global provider of bandwidth infrastructure services, has plans to go public. The Colorado-based company recently filed its S1 form for an initial public offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The number of shares to be offered and the price have not yet been determined, but the company indicated a proposed maximum aggregate offering of USD100 million.