Chapter 4: SAT-2 (Undersea Cable)
Telkom established the SAT-2 digital optical-fibre submarine cable in 1993, effectively providing southern Africa with access to global telecommunication highways. The SAT-2 is a 9 500 km long high performance optical-fibre submarine cable, linking the southern tip of Africa with Europe.
It runs along the ocean bed from Melkbosstrand just north of Cape Town to the Canary Islands and Madeira in the North Atlantic. SAT-2 has 15 360 channels, making it possible to handle 15 360 transmissions simultaneously and in different forms.
SAT-2
Submarine cable route. This replaced SAT-1 that landed on Ascension Island
The SAT-2 cable is an international project that is jointly financed by 15 companies in 14 countries, based on the number of channels each has purchased.
A new undersea fiber-optic cable (SAT-2), due to be commissioned in 1994, would carry a 565 Megabits per second transmission providing the equivalent of 7,680 voice channels.
SAT-2 would link South Africa to international telecommunications nodes in Madeira and the Canary Isles. In the mid-1990s, a modern telex service with over 30,000 connections linked all of South Africa s major population centers although, as in all nations, facsimile or fax service was displacing telex, and telex investments consequently became a major loss.
South Africa was one of the first countries to introduce a public videotex service (Beltel), which by 1993 included an X400 protocol electronic message handling service.
By the end of March 1992, the number of registered Beltel users was nearly 30,000, but the service has historically operated at a considerable loss (BMI TechKnowledge 1992, 99).
In 1983, an international packet-switching network (Sapo net-P) replaced an analog network and by 1993 linked South Africa to thirty-five countries.
In 1986, a digital point-to-point service (Diginet) for companies needing to transfer large volumes of data at high speeds was introduced.