Interview: Seacom CEO Byron Clatterbuck returns

Loading player...
In this promoted episode of the TechCentral podcast, Seacom CEO Byron Clatterbuck returns for a discussion about the big trends affecting the telecommunications industry in South Africa and the broader continent, particularly from a data perspective.
Clatterbuck talks about the ever-expanding demand for data from both consumers and businesses and why Seacom sees secondary cities as important next stage of its growth ambitions.
The conversation turns to edge computing and the growing view that, especially as 5G begins to take off, a lot of computational work isn’t, in fact, going to happen in large global data centres but at the edge, close to where it’s most needed for rapid, low-latency applications.
There’s a suggestion that this could put the advantage back in telecommunications operator’s courts, and away from the global cloud giants -- Clatterbuck talks about what this might mean for the industry, particularly as carriers and cloud providers begin working more closely together in future.
This is going to require more redundancy, more networks -- and certainly more fibre networks to connect everything together, he says.
Finally, the discussion turns to new subsea cables that are planned for construction around Africa, including Google's Equiano cable on the west coast. What's the business case for these new systems, and how will Seacom participate in them?
It's a great discussion -- don't miss it!
22 Aug 2019 English South Africa Technology · Business

Other recent episodes

Meet the CIO | Chris Shortt on what a supermarket becomes

Chris Shortt, chief technology officer at Shoprite Group, says the work of the next five years is meeting the customer at their point of need, wherever that is – and that this does not mean the end of the store. Speaking on TechCentral’s Meet the CIO podcast series, brought to…
9 Sep 43 min

Watts & Wheels | Why electric trucks are beating electric cars to South Africa

South Africa has still not crossed 1% of new vehicle sales going to electric vehicles, well short of the 5% mark at which adoption typically accelerates, The Electric Mission executive director Hiten Parmar told TechCentral’s Watts & Wheels with Wills. Parmar, who heads the non-profit advocacy body and co-founded the…
3 Sep 31 min

Winstone Jordaan on building a national EV charging network

Winstone Jordaan was building charging infrastructure before South Africa had electric cars to plug into it. GridCars began developing its backend platform in 2010. The first EVs arrived in 2013. In this episode of Watts & Wheels with Wills, the GridCars founder tells William Kelly why the hardware was never…
2 Sep 22 min

Watts & Wheels S1E8: ‘Tesla lands in Africa, just not here’

Episode 8 of Watts & Wheels – TechCentral’s electric motoring show – opens with William Kelly on his soapbox, clipboard in hand, and a simple demand: keep left, pass right. Too many South African drivers, he argues, treat the left indicator as an invitation to be overtaken rather than a…
24 Aug 1 hr 11 min