The first of the undersea cables that is to bring internet bounty to South Africa (and the rest of Africa) is set to be completed by the end of this month. That is good news for bidorbuy (and other online entities).

This is how the undersea schedule for southern Africa looks like:

• SEACOM, with the capacity of 1.28 Terabits per second (Tb/s), due end June 2009
• TEAMS (capacity 120 Gigabits per second, Gb/s), due September 2009
• EASSy (capacity 1.Tb/s), due June 2010
• WACS (capacity 3.8Tb/s), due 2011

To get the correct perspective on all those Terabits, you should know that there are 1024 Gigabits in one single Terabit. And the experts say that all current South African international bandwidth is transported over a cable which has the data capacity of about 130Gbs.

What do all those impressive numbers mean for you and for me? In short – more bandwidth, plus cheaper bandwidth. Even yes, we know it is difficut to believe from this perspective uncapped bandwidth at affordable prices!

Of course, all that cable-power will not seep down to our computers just like that. The internet service providers have to plug into it, stream it down their local network – and serve it to end users, businesses and individuals. By all calculations, the first fruits of the first undersea cable will be felt only in about half a year. We cannot wait!

Largely on the basis of the infrastructure that is being built, South African internet assess is expected to double in the next five years, taking the internet user population to the 9-million mark by 2014.

And we all know what that means. It means more shoppers on bidorbuy, who come here for convenience, large selection of items on offer, discounts, and pure fun. It also means more sellers, who come to have fun, to get rid of unwanted items, to set up a steady stream of secondary income, or to start a primary business. And of course, sellers on bidorbuy quickly become buyers. That means that the user base is only set to go up and up.

In case you are really into undersea cables, explore this amazing map of the internet’s undersea world as it is now and note the red lines (or rather, the lack of red lines) around Africa.  Then marvel over the map of the African internet undersea cables as they are to be in the medium-term future.