The first phase, which will connect Portugal, Nigeria and South Africa, will be completed in 2021, with more countries connected in the following years.
June 30, 2019
Alphabet Inc’s Google is planning to improving its cloud computing infrastructure as it has last week announced a new subsea cable to connect Africa with Europe. The subsea cable dubbed “Equiano” is fully funded by Google and after completion it will become the company’s third private international cable.
Over the last three years, the search engine giant came on making improvements in its technology infrastructure globally by investing $47 billion and the company said that Equiano is its 14th subsea cable investment it has made globally.
Rather than using the traditional switching method at wave-length level, the Equiano cable is based on space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology, with approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region. Equiano will be incorporating the optical switching technique at the fiber-pair level. Incorporation of optical switching will not only make Equiano the first subsea cable using that approach but will also make it easier to reallocate the same in different locations depending upon the requirement.
Google has inked an agreement with Alcatel Submarine Networks in the last quarter of 2018 to build the cable, first phase of which is expected to be completed in 2021 that will connect South Africa with Portugal.
