NAIROBI: Broadband connectivity is expected to lead to the growth of African economies but there is of work to be done in building the telecommunications backbone that will connect the continent to the global village. This, according to Aidan Baigrie, head of business development at SEACOM, who was speaking at the Sixth Annual Africa Economic Forum. He says that broadband is to the 21st century what railways were to the last century – the engine of social and economic progress that forges economic links between countries and supercharges trade and transactions. Baigrie says that new international cables such as SEACOM have helped to boost the performance of the Internet in many African countries while reducing costs for the end-user. Many African operators are also investing in national backhaul links and the last mile. Demand is being spurred by the availability of mobile broadband and cheaper smart phones, Baigrie says. But SEACOM is growing its capacity to keep up with demand. On one of SEACOM's terrestrial backhaul links, Infinera and SEACOM ran a world first field trial for a 500Gbps photonic integrated circuit (PIC), proving that although the demand for land-based fibre transmission speeds of 100s of Gigabits per second may still be in the future with projects such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the technology capable of achieving this is already available.
