A new subsea cable at an approximate cost of US$100 million is planned for South Africa and will link from Mtunzini in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) to Yzerfontein in the Western Cape (WC).
Techteledata is planning to build two 6000 square kilometre data centres, which will serve to house servers for both local telecommunications operators and international content companies.
The cable system will be equipped with landing stations at Port Elizabeth and East London and from these two Eastern Cape (EC) cities it will be connected to terrestrial fibre infrastructure built by companies like Broadband Infraco, Dark Fibre Africa (DFA), FibreCo and Telkom.
According to the company the TTD cable, named after Techteledata, will consist of either two or four pairs and will utilise the latest 100Gbit/s wavelength technology with a design capacity up to 16Tbit/s.
It seems plans to build the TTD cable may spark a race between Techteledata and eFive Telecoms, a South African company involved in the South Atlantic Express (SAEx) cable, which will run along the same route, but end in Brazilian town Fortaleza.
Another cable with a system that will extend from the east in Russia will also run along the same coastline of South Africa and will end in the west, in the United States via South America.
Techteledata may have the ability to launch its cable sooner since it is smaller than both Brics and SAEx. The launch date for the TTD cable has been set for September 2015, though it may be launched sooner provided the South African government cooperates.
