Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa

Submarine cables are a mystery to a lot of people. I had to show my dad a complete map of the cables once to convince him they exist. He just couldn’t fathom we’re actually able to run thousands of km of cables at the bottom of the ocean.

This is great. SA feels quite far away from the rest of the Internet (think 200ms) so anything that helps improve connectivity is a possive. Especially since this might foreshadow a local data center there. Azure has tech there. Google doesn't. Yet

This cable has a design capacity of ~320Tbps with 16 fiber pairs. The previously announced transatlantic cable, Dunant cable has 12 fiber pairs and a 250Tbps design capacity. These values could probably increase to around 480Tbps and 360Tbps with more advanced optical transmission equipment.

Side question: why is the Middle East not connected to India in the map[1] over Google’s fiber?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;gweb-cloudblog-publish&#x2F;images&#x2F;gcp_subsea_cables_XmzTBDO.max-1000x1000.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;storage.googleapis.com&#x2F;gweb-cloudblog-publish&#x2F;images...</a>

&gt; Once complete, Equiano will start in western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries.<p>I understand how undersea cables are laid, but how do you make use of a &quot;branching unit&quot; once it&#x27;s at the bottom of the sea? Send down a submersible to plug in the branch? Lift the cable back up, plug in the branch, and lower it again? Do they lay the cable with patch leads attached to the branching units, so you just have to dredge those up and plug the rest of the branch in?

I wonder if Google have plans for Cape Town? It is the most tech savvy city on the continent

Related and a big reason for the existence of this new cable: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skatelescope.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.skatelescope.org&#x2F;</a><p>The Square Kilometre Array, on its initial phase, will have close to 200 dish radio telescopes and 130000 radio antennas working together in South Africa and Australia. The amount of data produced is predicted at 50% of all internet traffic (this was calculated 2 years ago, probably it changed a bit). A big part of that data will be distributed across the globe for science, being the main link originating in South Africa and ending up in Europe.<p>This will be the biggest scientific endeavor (by size) of mankind so far.<p>The Phase 2 of the SKA (for now just an idea), will increase the number of telescope dishes and antennas by a factor of 10.

Would this only be used for services l&#x2F;sites that run on Google Cloud? Or does the entire Internet benefit directly

I wonder if this signals that Space&#x2F;Balloon&#x2F;Satellite Internet is too far away? Or maybe it&#x27;s just worth doing this anyway because there&#x27;s no risk of Kessler Syndrome under the sea.

Great to read this. I’ve Experienced problems when the WACs cable goes down so anything to improve comms is good by me. How much better is optical switching btw?

Does it do EU in &lt; 40ms?

Anybody remember Google Fiber? Makes you wonder if this may be hit with similar issues. IE: it takes longer than they anticipated, it costs more than anticipated etc..