60ms cross continent

Tue Jul 7 19:58:37 UTC 2020

Watching the growth of terrestrial fiber (and PTP microwave) networks going
inland from the west and east African coasts has been interesting. There's
a big old C-band earth station on the hill above Freetown, Sierra Leone
that was previously the capital's only link to the outside world. Obsoleted
for some years now thanks to the submarine cable and landing station. I
imagine they might keep things live as a backup path with a small C-band
transponder MHz commit and SCPC modems linked to an earth station somewhere
in Europe, but not with very much capacity or monthly cost.

The landing station in Mogadishu had a similar effect.

On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 1:45 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka at seacom.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 7/Jul/20 10:07, Eric Kuhnke wrote:
> > The most noteworthy thing I'm seeing in C band these days, is many
> > customers formerly 100% reliant upon it shifting their traffic to
> > newly built submarine fiber routes.
>
> Before most of Africa had submarine fibre, a lot of our traffic was
> carried on C-Band.
>
> In the decade preceding the arrival of submarine fibre, we reduced costs
> by moving to Inclined Orbit satellites, which were mainly operated on
> Ku-Band. So outages due to rain were a normal and accepted part of doing
> business. ISP's that maintained C-Band satellites survived rain fade,
> but had much higher operating costs.
>
> Nowadays, satellite services are generally used in remote locations, and
> for specific applications. Submarine fibre is the norm.
>
> Mark.
>
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