New submarine cable system to connect Africa, Europe

Terrestrial fibre investments key to digital economy
Google has announced a new private subsea cable, Equiano that will shuttle high-speed data between Africa and Europe.The Equiano cable is named for Olaudah Equiano an African writer and abolitionist, who was sold into slavery prior to buying his own freedom.

The Equiano cable will start in Western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branches along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries. The first branch is slated to land in Nigeria.

The first phase of the project, connecting South Africa with Portugal, is slated to be finished in 2021. Equiano is Google’s third private cable, following on the heels of Dunant (between Europe and the U.S.) and Curie, which runs between the U.S. and Chile. Marie Curie was a Nobel Prize winning scientist while Henry Dunant was a Swiss businessman that founded the Red Cross, and was the winner of the first Nobel Prize.

The Equiano cable, which will be laid by Alcatel Submarine Networks, will tap into space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology, which will enable about 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve the region. Google is also adding SDM to the transatlantic Dunant cable, according to a Google blog.

Traditional subsea cables are powered from the shore and need a dedicated set of pump lasers to amplify the optical signal for each fiber pair as data travels the length of the cable, according to Google.

“SDM increases cable capacity in a cost-effective manner with additional fiber pairs (twelve, rather than six or eight in traditional subsea cables) and power-optimized repeater designs,” according to the blog. “These advancements were created in partnership with SubCom, a global partner for undersea data transport, which will engineer, manufacture and install the Dunant system utilizing their SDM technology and equipment.”

Over the last three years, Google has invested $47 billion to improve its global infrastructure. Google has a total of 14 investments in international cables, including joint ventures.

Meanwhile, experts at the International Telecoms Week’s (ITW) Africa Panel Session have said that terrestrial fiber infrastructure investments are key to enabling the growth of Africa’s digital economy.Held recently in Atlanta, USA, with the theme: “Enabling Africa’s Digital Economy,” Principal Analyst at TeleGeography, Patrick Christian, evaluated the African digital economy, noting that the study of global trends show Africa maintaining its position as the fastest growing region in Internet usage though data volumes remain shockingly lower than other parts of the world.

Christian underscored the importance of the role content providers such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook, play in driving Internet traffic and the expectation that their traffic on the continent will increase with the growth of Africa’s digital economy. It is expected that having more content beginning to reside and be exchanged within Africa, will add tremendous benefits to the ecosystem.

A panel that included high-level representation from MainOne, Google, Avanti Plc, Angola Cables, CSquared Africa, and WIOCC engaged in compelling discourse that highlighted these and other key factors for development in Africa’s digital economy.

The dialogue centered on the notion that the development of the terrestrial network is key to growing the digital economies of all African countries. A point further emphasized by MainOne’s CEO, Funke Opeke, who stated that the organization is currently working in Lagos State of Nigeria to enable digital transformation through the deployment of 2500km of fibre across the State, adding to the almost 1000km of fibre currently deployed.

Opeke stated, “Our immediate focus is to ensure we have fibre to the towers, fiber to schools, health care facilities, and other government agencies, fiber to the enterprise/business districts, and with a density to reach within 1km of the majority of citizens in Lagos. We envisage having network density whereby over 60 per cent of the population is within 1km of fibre access with the planned deployment.”