Confirmation that critical portions of the new Seacom 17,000 kilometre under-sea fibre optic cable linking Africa to Europe and India have been completed marked a momentous occasion for higher education in South Africa. As universities around the world became used to fast and affordable internet that handles large volumes of data, South Africa's universities were left to languish in the connectivity dark ages because they lacked a telecommunications infrastructure.

Duncan Greaves, acting CEO of the Centre for Higher Education Transfer, said Seacom's completion last month had profound implications for South Africa's tertiary education institutions. The Seacom submarine cable cost an estimated US$650 million to build.

"Typically, northern hemisphere universities have between 10 and 100 times as much bandwidth as we have in South Africa. We've been functioning under a terrible bandwidth drought, and Seacom will bring about parity," Greaves told University World News.

"We will be able to participate in a meaningful way in research, development and education that was impossible before. Seacom will also enhance our ability to attract and retain professionals who need proper broadband to work."

Until recently, South African universities were predominately reliant on Telkom's dual Sat3/Safe cable, a 120 gigabit per second (GB/s) capacity submarine cable financed and jointly owned by an international consortium led by the then state-owned SA Telkom, to connect with Europe.

The Sat3 cable runs from Europe down the west coast of Africa where it lands at Melkbosstrand near Cape Town, and also at Mtunzini near Durban, where it links to the SAFE (South Africa Far East) cable. This continues across the Indian Ocean, linking South Africa to India and Malaysia, and came into use during 2001.

But the situation was far from ideal as Telkom, with a monopoly in the marketplace, kept access costs high and bandwidth restricted to 40GB/s until 2007. The 'second network operator', Neotel, was then allowed by the government to enter the market although it still had to buy bandwidth from Telecom's Sat3/Safe cable.

The situation has changed with the imminent commissioning of the Seacom submarine cable, which boasts a 1.2 terabits per second (Tbps) capacity. Seacom Ltd is registered in Mauritius and has contracted Neotel to be its landing partner in South Africa. The company will operate the Seacom cable station at the seaside village of Mtunzini, in the east coast province of KwaZulu-Natal, north of Durban.

The construction of Seacom, a joint venture between African and American shareholders, is a remarkable story because the submarine cable that runs from Marseilles across the Mediterranean Ocean to Egypt and then southwards along the east African coast as far as South Africa, has taken only two years to complete. Other competing undersea cables that started as far back as 2002 still have a long way to go.

When Seacom comes online next month everything is set to change and the first to benefit from the extra bandwidth capacity - at a fraction of the cost charged by Telkom - will be South Africa's higher education and research institutions.

TENET - a charitable company owned by South Africa's universities and research councils, and established to secure the institutions' internet and information technology services - has a deal with Seacom to buy a portion of the bandwidth it has to offer.

"We have bought 10 GB/s for the duration of the cable's lifespan which, from an engineering perspective, is around 20 years. But commercially we can expect an economic life of about 10 years," said TENET CEO Duncan Martin.

The challenge facing TENET prior to the arrival of Seacom was immense and was aptly summed up by a University of Cape Town's information and communication technology services department web posting last February.

In a response to a question why the internet was so slow on campus, the department responded that the R650,000 (US$80,500) per month the institution spent on 32 mega bytes per second (MBPS) of national internet bandwidth and 26 MBPS of international bandwidth was not enough.

"The main challenge that we face is that the university simply cannot afford to purchase sufficient bandwidth to provide a reasonable service to its 25,000 users and 10,000 networked computers," the posting read.

According to Martin, the new level of broadband access should change the landscape of tertiary education and research in a relatively short time. Telecommunications infrastructure that takes bandwidth from the cable landing stations to the country's 98-odd campuses is being put in place, first using temporary arrangements to ensure new levels of broadband are available sooner.

"Establishing the backbone network that takes broadband from the beach to the campuses is much more difficult, so we are securing temporary arrangements. But the backbone will be finished in six months and we hope to be fully operational by the beginning of next year," Martin said.

"Researchers and students involved in data-intensive research like radio astronomy, oceanography and physicists, who were dying to access the nuclear research taking place at CERN in Europe, will have the type of bandwidth they need. These people's careers depend on access to high-performance computing facilities so in the past they would not base themselves in South Africa. The new level of broadband access should go some way to halting the brain drain we have been experiencing."

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