Underwater venture will give IT more backbone

Chinese giant is helping expand a major cable that connects with Europe, one of its many ventures

China's Huawei Technologies is helping Africa advance deeper into the digital age with such projects as upgrading an undersea cable to Europe, which will help in reducing the urban-rural digital divide and expansion of connectivity to libraries, schools and data-hungry users.

A subsidiary of the Chinese global information and communications technology giant, Huawei Marine Networks Co Ltd, was picked in March, jointly with UK-based Global Marine Systems Ltd, to upgrade the 16,000-kilometer fiber optic cable to meet Africa's increased bandwidth needs.

The joint venture involves infrastructure owned by 17 international telecommunication carriers in Africa and Europe. Known as the West Africa Cable System, the venture will upgrade the cable from its current 10 gigabits per second to 100 gbps in phases this year. Gbps means billions of bits per second and is a measure of bandwidth on a digital data transmission medium.

The medium in this case is a submarine cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa. It links Yzerfontein in the western Cape of South Africa to London.

It is owned by a consortium of telecommunications companies drawn from countries including South Africa, Cote d'Ivoire, Cape Verde Islands, Spain, Portugal, the UK, India and Canada.

The cable landing point or the location where the underwater cable makes landfall in Namibia also provides accessibility for landlocked countries such as Botswana, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi.

Reports filed by high-tech oriented IDG News Service from Lusaka, Zambia, say this marks the "growing importance" of the cable system infrastructure for western and southern African countries.

Also, Equatorial Guinea's government has contracted Huawei to build the Ceiba-2 Submarine Cable System. The infrastructure is designed to increase the country's capacity by enabling it to connect to larger submarine cable systems including the West Africa Cable System, SAT-3 and Main one by the fourth quarter of 2015.

While awarding the company the contract, Ole Bahamonde, head of Equatorial Guinea's Ministry of Transport, Post and Telecommunications, said the move will boost the vitality of the country's economy.

"It will substantially boost the economic and commercial development of the country."

SAT-3/WASC is a fiber optic cable linking Portugal and Spain to South Africa with connections to several West African countries. It forms part of a cable system that also links South Africa to Asia.

Huawei has also struck a $40 million deal with Surfline Communications, Ghana's first LTE operator, to expand its services to Ghanaian cities that have a burgeoning number of data users. LTE is a standard for high-speed data for mobile phones and data terminals that is used widely around the world but only in some countries in Africa.

The local company says that once completed, the project will boast more than 700 cell sites.

The move to invest in information technology infrastructure is a big step, said Peng Song, president of Huawei's West Africa region, in an interview with Nigeria's Vanguard newspaper. It increases accessibility, considering fixed-line infrastructure in most African countries is limited and underdeveloped. According to the International Telecommunications Union, fixed broadband penetration in Africa is only 0.3 percent.

This makes upgrading the existing fixed-line infrastructure more costly and less effective.

Building mobile networks can significantly bridge the digital divide between urban and rural resident, Peng says. Users can connect seamlessly and wirelessly to fast and reliable data networks.

Constructing mobile broadband networks can make effective use of existing equipment and technologies, lowering the cost of the initial investment. Mobile broadband enabled devices would also be more affordable.

In Nigeria, the biggest economy in Africa, Huawei has deployed the National Information and Communication Technology Infrastructure Backbone project for the federal government. In addition, it has successfully deployed e-libraries, e-classes and smart campus networks.

In Kenya, the company was awarded the contract to build a national fiber optic infrastructure to connect the capital, Nairobi, to other key towns in the country. The project, which is jointly funded by the government of Kenya and a loan from the Chinese government, is expected to be fully implemented by the end of 2015.

This is in line with the government's policy to decentralize its services to the newly created 47 counties that have taken over local administrative functions. It will make accessing public services easier and cheaper.

Huawei, founded in the late 1980s as a third-party reseller of telecom devices in Shenzhen, China, has become a global force in telecommunications. Its overall group revenue reached $46.5 billion in 2014, an increase of 20.6 percent on 2013, and group net profit reached $4.5 billion, up 32.7 percent year on year, according to its annual report.

Huawei's activities in Africa have been aggressive, and there are no signs of it letting up, industry observers say. A lot more is expected as investors channel investments toward this fast-emerging sector.

According to Deloitte on Africa's African Construction Report 2014, the technology, media and telecommunications sector contributed only 3 percent to the value of construction in the continent in 2014. In West Africa, the sector's value was 1 percent, and it was 3 percent in East Africa.

lucymorangi@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily Africa Weekly 05/15/2015 page7)