Africa has come a long way with regards to broadband, previously relying heavily on Satellite connections for Internet access the continent now has a multitude of undersea fibre cables serving it with access to high speed Internet.

Some African countries like South Africa, Senegal, Ghana and Cameroon have already been making use of underwater fibre cables for Internet access since a few years back but due to the age and high bandwidth prices on the SAT3/Safe cable system these countries did not really have access to affordable high speed broadband.

Since the landing of Seacom in July 2009, African countries have been enjoying high speed Internet access at affordable rates and with numerous cables still to land in Africa, the speed of broadband in Africa is steadily on the rise while the prices are declining as the competition heats up.

With all these underwater cables landing in Africa, who cries king in terms of the fastest broadband speeds in Africa? According to tests conducted by users of African countries on Speedtest.net here is a list of the top 5 broadband countries in Africa:

Compared to the top rated broadband countries in the World, Africa still has a long way to go to catch up to avg. speeds of 34 or 24 Mbps, but its good to see that Africa’s top 5 countries has at least broken the 2 Mbps mark for average download speeds.

The construction of EASSy, WIOCC’s East African Submarine Cable System, is complete and promises to bring cheaper more affordable international bandwidth pricing to South Africa.

Just last year Seacom completed construction of their underwater fibre cable and soon after that they went live bringing the first true competition to the SAT3 undersea cable system that for long had the monopoly.

The final splice which joins the two segments of the EASSy cable took place a few days ahead of schedule at 00:40 in the early hours of Monday 19th of April 2010.

Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC said: “Now that this critical stage of the project has been completed successfully and ahead of time, we will start system testing almost immediately. Once this is finalised, we are looking forward to connecting our first customers to the network from July 2010.”

The key difference between EASSy and the other undersea fiber cables currently providing South Africa with Internet access is that EASSy deliver connectivity to Europe via a direct line through the Red and Mediterranean seas ensuring for faster and shorter distances for data to travel to reach European countries.

“EASSy’s affordable pricing and open access structure also promise to revolutionise many African markets, bringing flexible, cost-effective international connectivity to fixed line, mobile and data network operators and ISPs throughout east, central and southern Africa”. According to James Wekesa, WIOCC’s Chief Commercial Officer

It’s great to see another cable nearing completion and getting ready to launch, who knows before the end of the year we may have uncapped unshaped bandwidth with low content ratio’s for under a R100. What do you think? Will the EASSy cable contribute further to lower broadband prices in South Africa?