Finance discussions for the planned 10,000-kilometre South Atlantic Express (SAex) cable connecting South Africa with Brazil \u201care well advanced,\u201d according to the newly appointed CEO at eFive Telecoms, the company behind the R3 billion project.<\/p>\n
With the group having gone quiet in the second half of 2011, Rosalind Thomas, CEO of eFive Telecoms <\/a>told BusinessTech, \u201cI am pleased to advise that the vendor selection process is close to being finalised and finance discussions are well advanced.\u201d<\/p>\n A number of market experts have however, questioned the ability to fund the cable, and its operational time-frame.<\/p>\n Lawrence Mulaudzi, the MD of eFive, said in April last year that a worst-case date for the cable\u2019s commissioning would be June 2013, with a best-case date for the first quarter of that year.<\/p>\n The group said that the Bank of China announced that it was interested in investing 60% of the funds required for the project. The Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa has also expressed interest in funding.<\/p>\n SAex is a proposed submarine communications cable linking South Africa and Angola to Brazil with onward connectivity to the United States that will connect to the existing GlobeNet cable system.<\/p>\n If it were to go-ahead, the initial design capacity of the cable would be 12.8 TBit\/s and would be over 10,000 kilometres in length. It would consist of four fibre pairs, each capable of carrying 3,2TBit\/s of data using 40GBit\/s wavelength technology. Two fibre pairs \u2014 with a combined design capacity of 6,4TBit\/s \u2014 would be extended to South Africa from an undersea branching unit, with another two fibre pairs likely to be extended to Angola.<\/p>\n The group said it was in discussions with Neotel<\/a>, FibreCo<\/a>, a partnership between Cell C<\/a>, Internet Solutions<\/a> and Convergence Partners<\/a> to access fibre.<\/p>\n