Summary

  • In 2004, Seychelles ISP Atlas moved from a third-party local telecom gateway to its own international leased circuit to Europe, purchased directly from INTELSAT and carried through a newly commissioned VSAT earth station.
  • The change answered reported high latency and an inability to upgrade the previous link; the contemporary announcement described lower latency as an expected benefit, not a measured result.

Atlas began Internet service on 27 September 1996, when then-Finance Minister James Michel launched it at Beau Vallon Berjaya Bay Hotel. Eight years later, a Seychelles Nation report described the first ISP’s infrastructure decision in unusually concrete terms: the previous international link came through a local telecom operator, suffered high latency and could not be upgraded to greater bandwidth. Atlas had acquired a leased circuit to Europe directly from INTELSAT, installed and commissioned a VSAT earth station, and said it was ready to carry customer traffic. This was a change in the control surface, not an escape from interdependence.

Atlas could procure an international circuit directly and decide to cut over from the old route. But the new path still relied on a leased satellite service, a ground station, local network operations, foreign currency and the wider systems that made an IP route useful. The report calls the circuit expensive in foreign currency. For a small island economy, that cost was part of the engineering decision, not a footnote. The reported chronology helps keep the change in scale. An NSRC provider entry created in 1997 and updated in 2002 lists a 2 Mbps satellite connection to Hong Kong via Hong Kong Telecoms, based in Victoria, Mahé.

It says service was available to islands with telephone connectivity. That is a dated snapshot; it does not establish that Atlas still used the same route in 2004. The Central Bank’s 2001 report, meanwhile, records plans for 60 more modems alongside 30 analogue modems and expected bandwidth expansion. Those were plans and projections, not proof that the upgrades were completed. In 2004 Atlas’s chairman said the INTELSAT circuit would reduce latency and help the company expand.

The report documents the expectation and says the new earth station was ready for traffic; it does not publish a before-and-after latency series, circuit capacity, traffic figures or uptime. The cut-over had taken place the preceding Friday. Atlas warned that an IP-address change and unavoidable domain-name propagation could cause minor disruption—a reminder that changing a physical upstream route also reaches into addressing and user-facing continuity. The episode is best read as a bounded attempt to buy operational room.

Direct procurement addressed a specific bottleneck: a third-party link that was both slow in latency terms and difficult to scale. It did not make Atlas independent of international infrastructure, nor does the available record show how long the improvement lasted. What it does show is an early ISP treating upstream access as something it could redesign, at a substantial currency cost, rather than accept as a fixed local service.

Sources