Google has announced plans to install Equiano, a submarine cable that will boost its cloud computing infrastructure across Africa and Europe. Equiano will be Google’s 14th submarine cable investment globally. In the last three years, the search engine giant has invested about $47 billion in improving its global technology infrastructure. The first phase of the Equiano project which will connect South Africa to Portugal will be completed in 2021.
Submarine cables carry 99% of the world’s data traffic. Equiano will start in Western Europe and run along the western coast of Africa with branches along the way to other African countries. The first branch of Equiano is expected to land in Nigeria. Google has a culture of naming its submarine cables after historians. Which is why, Equiano was named after Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian born writer who was enslaved as a young boy and eventually bought his own freedom.
Google's 3rd subsea cable will pump data from Portugal to South Africa, and eventually Nigeria. It’s named Equiano, after an enslaved Nigerian writer who bought his own freedom.https://t.co/sUqGpYslMv pic.twitter.com/u5vtmwTD2i
— Charles Onyango-Obbo (@cobbo3) June 29, 2019
The contract to build the submarine cable was awarded to Alcatel Submarine Networks in the fourth quarter of 2018. Google recently completed the “Curie” project, a submarine cable that connects Chile to Los Angeles, in the month of April. The Dunant transatlantic project that will connect France to the US is scheduled to roll out in 2020.
According to google’s blog post, they usually use the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching; Equiano will be the first of their project to incorporate optical switching at the fiber pair level. This will simplify the allocation of cable capacity and the flexibility to relocate cables to different locations whenever required.
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