SEACOM had made substantial investments in expanding its network infrastructure during 2016 and plans to significantly upgrade network bandwidth in 2017 to cater for the growth of big data, the cloud and video. 

SEACOM has invested in shifting all key elements of the network to 100G technology, which increases capacity throughput while reducing cost. Initially, SEACOM is lighting 500 Gbps in new capacity on the new backbone platform from Africa to Europe that came online in January 2017. Thanks to the new technology, additional upgrades can be done as needed with less than 30 days’ lead-time.

Says SEACOM CEO, Byron Clatterbuck: “SEACOM is the largest IP Transit provider on the African continent, and has led the process of getting all the key content players into Africa. There will be continued growth from these “Over-The-Top-Players” and SEACOM is preparing for scale that will serve their future growth.”

SEACOM is also expanding its coverage into new regions and countries. During 2016, it launched its first IP point of presence (PoP) in Kigali, Rwanda, and recently added a PoP in Gaborone, Botswana.

Growing the solutions portfolio

Another strategic priority for SEACOM lies in enhancing and growing its solutions portfolio for enterprise and operator customers. During 2016, SEACOM added value-added services such as voice and security to its enterprise product portfolio.

During 2017, SEACOM will introduce new managed services products for enterprises, and invest in technologies such as software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN), network function virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networks (SDN). These technologies will allow SEACOM more flexibility as it grows, reduce infrastructure costs and enable SEACOM to roll out robust cloud computing offerings for enterprise customers.