Remember back to the SEACOM and TEAMS landings. It important to draw a distinction between the “landing of the cable” and the completion of the project. The former refers to the mere physical completion of the cable between the two landing stations, while the latter refers to the actual ready-for-commercial-service date of the cable. Many news sources inaccurately report a landing as a start of service. This is hardly the case, considering cables have other landing points and must be thoroughly tested. A glance at recent cable events shows substantial uncertainty in predicting timetables:

1. February 28, 2009 – SEACOM cable lands at Mombasa
2. June 12, 2009 – TEAMS cable lands at Mombasa
3. June 27, 2009 – SEACOM scheduled to go live
4. July 23, 2009 – SEACOM goes live
5. September 5, 2009 – GLO-1 cable lands at Lagos
6. Mid-September 2009 – TEAMS scheduled to go live
7. October 2009 – TEAMS goes live? There are very few mentions of this event.
8. When does GLO-1 go live? The initial date was late 2009, but then was changed to Q1 2010.
9. Next up: Main One (Portugal->Ghana->Nigeria->South Africa) in May 2010.

At this point in time, the EASSy progress is ahead of schedule and the owners/investors/participants have undoubtedly learned from obstacles encountered by previous cable projects.