Hello,
I concur with AFSAT. I work for a global network provider and we have seen a shift from sea bed fibre cable back to SAT in some Atlantic Sea-board countries in Africa eg Nigeria, Angola, Ghana, Cameroon etc.

This is primarily due to the fact that in most of those countries, the government owned telecommunications companies control and maintain connection to all the sea-bed fibre cables (WACS, SAT3, OnE) . Those companies eg. Nigeria Telecom (Nitel), Angola Telecom and the Cameroon Tel. have the same don't care attitude that Telekom Kenya had in the dark days. For instance there is a cyclone that took out the stub cable that runs from the cable station on shore to the main cable out to in the sea. It was spliced 11 days after it got cut. During that cable black-out one could not even call Angola coz all their voice telecoms pass over the cable. Nobody had bothered to check if the backup satellite links was alive since the cable was installed 3 years before. Our customer ordered for for a SAT connection without a second thought. We whipped up an Internet offload solution for him so that all critical traffic passed through the SAT connection and the other non-critical traffic took the cable route.

There are also many many intermittent outages that are not caused directly by the cable itself. For instance in Lagos Nigeria, there is a power blackout every 1 or 2 hours. People who have been there can bear me witness. When the power goes, all the switches in the last mile to the cable sub-station (including the sub-station itself) have to reboot. As a user somewhere inland, one will think that its the cable or the network service provider. Serious organizations eventually move back to SAT for their critical applications and voice communications.

Complete lack of or poor inland telecoms infrastructure in the same countries make it impossible for inland cities like Abuja in Nigeria, Huambo in Angola or Yaounde (of all places) in Cameroon to enjoy the benefits of sea-bed cable connectivity. Some of the causes are pure ignorance.. eg Cameroon .. Yaunde is less that 200km from Doula (at the coast) but has never bee connected .. well at least the last time I checked. The other are as a result of War. Did you know that the only way to travel within Angola inland eg  from Luanda to Huambo is by Air !!  why ? there are no roads completely ... why ?  Land Mines ! .. millions of them. So who can risk their lives to go entrench fibre cable inland ? ...  you guessed it .. Stick to the Satellite you know ...

Lastly they all suffer from cable vandalism syndrome. Here is a self explanatory link ---> http://www.redorbit.com/news/technology/109817/vandals_cut_optical_fiber_cable_in_nigeria/index.html


To conclude ... I think that  ... that is why SERIOUS organizations like Kenya Airways decided to deploy a pure satellite network for their Africa Offices and stations. read here -->  http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/kenya-airways-selects-sita%E2%80%99s-vsat-network-10-million-deal

therefore VSAT still has some lifetime to live... 

Please also note the VSAT is independent of geograhical boudaries. So lets no look at Kenya in isolation , now that the cable has arrived. Therefore iWAY will still have a large market.  On the other hand Fibre cable is dependent on Georgraphy  example I am sure that Ugandans would not want the fibre cable to Kamplala to pass through Kibera .. coz according to Museveni...  there are some  "Mad Jaluos" (no offence meant to my fello Luos)  who can cause untold suffering in the name of  Information Outage.. whenever he decides to annex something ...





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