By Victor Adar
Joseph Muriithi is keeping his head up high. As the Managing Director at Sea Submarine Communications, he is the man driving growth not only here but also within the region especially in the North East Africa. His work revolves around localization of Internet connections to spur faster speeds and also to allow ISPs to save almost Sh152 million per year on international connectivity.
To arrive at where he is today, Muriithi chose to manage Seacom differently by delving into a win-win partnership with more undersea cables. He is looking at competition differently.
Landing of the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) and LION high capacity cables, he says, are not a threat but rainmakers.
His goal is to see innovations come to light, as economy and community thrive. And if working together in more ways than one can make things happen then automatically innovation will pick up pace.
“We have a relationship with other cable systems,” he says. “We don’t fight other cable systems. We work with them, so Teams, Lion et cetera… we just operate with them to take the services to the next level.”
The firm weathers the storm by solving the international bandwidth problem thanks to landing fibre optic cables at the shores of Eastern and Southern Africa. Today, it is much easier to see the 20-fold increase in international bandwidth, which is currently at 20Gbit per second. This is reflected in a reduction in costs a time when most Kenyans are using Smartphone to browse. The elephant in the room at the moment is how to get the much-needed high-speed capacity to users in each country.
From where Muriithi sits, producing substantial savings to users by interconnecting locally, without traffic being pointed back to the US or Europe like it was during younger years of the Internet of things, is the beginning of good tidings. Through the Kenya Internet Exchange Point (KIXP) much greater value is being delivered as consumption of Internet continues to grow. Perhaps the Kenyan exchange is an advantage localizing more than 1Gbit/s of peak traffic, dramatically reducing latency from 200-600ms to 2-10ms on average, and lifts revenue of as much as Sh600 million a year per operator on the back of increased Internet usage.
“In Europe we have created London exchange peering, and upstream providers which take you to Europe and other places. We can give you bursting up to four times your capacity. We can connect you to Asian and China routes. We also have Africa in two routes. We have connected to all cable exchange points including Kenya’s Internet Exchange Point. So it means that if you access Seacom you also access many others out there,” says Muriithi.
Seacom launched Africa’s first broadband submarine cable system in 2009, a good seven years of experience. Back then we were only talking about cable system. It has since moved beyond being a cable operator to become a major pan-African service provider, offering a full suite of resilient and scalable data services that allow Africa’s growing ICT community to develop and evolve big time.
Ranging from flexible Ethernet services to IP Transit service capabilities and accessible Internet connectivity, it is eyeing tailor-made communication solutions. But where is its presence? Which sites can it serve?
There is submarine system with a cable into Durban, Dar es Salaam, Djibouti, and Tanzania. The firm is very expansive in South Africa since it serves borders of South Africa.
It is also connected to Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, and Namibia.
“We have relationships that help us to serve all people in Africa. We have a connection to serve all people. We also have private lines which means somebody who wants to connect for example if you have another office in London and you want a video connection, we will give you that on private line. So we dedicate a path for you. It’s like an aeroplane always flying both ways all the time so you use it as you wish,” he points out.
The biggest catch about submarine telecommunications is how it reduces the cost of doing business as the system provides cheaper alternative to the traditional satellite connections, which are now a thing of the past. It is not just about laying cables, but the much broader benefits it feeds to local Internet infrastructure.
According to an Assessment of the Impact of Internet Exchange Points – Empirical Study of Kenya and Nigeria by the Internet Society, business is booming so much that one operator alone is seeing a revenue increase of just under Sh6 billion a year from the rise in locally routed Internet traffic.
The story is changing so much that Kenya today can be described as a hotbed of technology thanks to better Internet experience. It has been key in assisting not only individuals and private firms but also state corporations. The Kenya Revenue Authority is one good example. It used local routing that saw 160,524 citizens file their income taxes online in the first half of fiscal year 2011, as 5,000 users registered for the customs system, representing 95% of the industry.
Creating infrastructure for cloud computing was the next big thing. If you have equipment, which has to be hosted, Seacom will help fill the gap. Shifting content and routing to the local exchange has similarly impacted the growth of content. Perhaps the effort to enter Over The Top services space was informed by this.
With opportunities and targets being met, the cable Internet provider is finding it easy going that the will to invest heavily in Ethernet, and using the fastest Ethernet speeds of 1Gbps, 10Gbps and 100Gbps is truly paying off. Users are now most likely able to enjoy much faster Internet access than those buying services on older, legacy or slower technology. Business is getting better and more advanced as the firm continues to grow.
