Changing face of Gateway in East Africa

Ships like this are instrumental in the laying of east African subsea cables. Gateway continues to invest in these projects.

2009 is going to be an incredibly exciting year for African telecommunications. Expected in June, SEACOM, the 13,700km under-sea cable, will connect South Africa, Mozambique, Madagascar, Tanzania, and Kenya with India and Egypt. Eastern Africa will, for the first time, have access to high-speed connectivity with the cable providing 1.2 Terabits of capacity, a total bandwidth of 1,190,000 megabits of data. Gateway was a foundation customer and one of the first investors in SEACOM, having bought a 155 Mbps (STM1) circuit in 2007.

The landing of these cables demonstrates that Africa’s information age is well underway. Fiber opens people’s eyes to what ICT can deliver – to consumers and businesses. It will provide competition and connectivity into markets, which will drive demand for bandwidth and services. We are seeing demand for satellite services increasing, firstly because they will provide redundancy and back-up for the forthcoming cables and secondly because satellite is still the only service that can satisfy the high demand for bandwidth further inland where cable is yet to be available.

As the landscape of African connectivity continues to expand and develop, so we look at how Gateway must broaden its reach into new markets and deepen its service offerings in established ones. To this end, we are opening new offices in Nairobi and Kampala and will be recruiting to grow our team there. This will allow us to expand our services and network, continuing to offer communications across satellite, wireless systems or cable and providing the infrastructure to meet the ever-growing demand of carriers and businesses across the region.

Opportunities abound in East Africa and we are very excited about the prospect for more and better connectivity improving access to education, information and global networks.