Yesterday Pan-African fibre optic service provider SEACOM officially unveiled a new product portfolio under Seacom Business division here in Kenya. This follows the launch of a similar business solution in the South African market last year. These new products and services portfolio are specifically targeted at the business segment. With these new products SEACOM intends to sell capacity across its infrastructure directly into large corporate clients. On the other hand SEACOM plans to reach out to the SME market through partners.
SEACOM, which is mostly known for the undersea fibre optic cable, will be offering internet services among other business solutions directly to businesses. This basically means businesses can now go directly to Seacom and its business partners, who are not clear at this stage, for high-speed, fibre-based services. We will have to wait a while to see if they will ultimately venture into fibre to the home (FTTH) solution that caters for domestic consumers.
The list of services they intend to offer to corporates with this new product include:
- Cloud services – under this category they intend to offer hosted mail, online backup, virtual server hosting, hosted security, end-point protection among other cloud based services. Customers stand to experience improved business processes and reduced costs.
- Ethernet services – they will offer dedicated, transparent, EoMPLS layer–2 virtual private networking connectivity across Seacom’s network and onwards through international partner networks.
- Private line services – they promise secure, dedicated, low-latency connectivity across multiple cable systems that connect Africa, Europe, and Asia, as well as national key interconnection points in Africa
- Internet access services – this category provides customers with high-speed access through global tier 1 providers, a mesh of subsea and terrestrial routes, as well as optimised routing to key African operators, service providers, and content delivery networks.
Seacom wants you to not just consider them as the cable up the East coast of Africa but also the guys who will be providing lightning-fast bandwidth at highly competitive prices. They did not make it clear the cost of the different packages they have at hand. On internet speed they promised fibre internet access with options ranging up to 1Gbps. This is according to Mr. Byron Clatterbuck, Seacom CEO.
Mr. Joe Mucheru, the Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of Information, Communications and Technology, who was also in attendance, said this move by Seacom was bound to disrupt the Kenyan fibre internet access market and maybe we might see the cost of internet connection coming down.
