The fibre will be lit with modern technology that will give the new link a design capacity of over 8 terabits per second (T/bs), in line with Seacom's plans to expand the marine portion of the cable to over 4.8 Tb/s. This enormous amount of capacity enables Seacom to align current and future customer needs with the explosion in broadband demand driven by a wave of content-rich applications such as cloud computing to meet enterprise requirements, HD video streaming and IPTV services.

"In our continuous quest to improve quality of service, this is one of the many investments that we are making to ensure that we provide our customers with the best possible support as we continue to build the African Internet based on low-latency, high speed and reliable infrastructure," Herlihy said.

The improvements go toward supporting the company's vision of an African internet experience characterised by abundant local content, minimal latency, fast download and streaming speeds, and interconnected African markets.