Google lays undersea internet cable between Portugal and South Africa

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Google is going to lay a fiber optic cable under the sea from Portugal to South Africa. The cable should be ready in 2021, and has up to twenty times more capacity to transport data to various African countries.

The cable will be named Equiano, named after the Nigerian writer and slaver Olaudah Equiano. It is the third submarine cable that Google is laying itself, in addition to the Dunant cable between America and France and the Curie cable from America to Chile. Google is also a member of a number of consortia that have their own cables between continents.

The Equiano cable is made by Alcatel Submarine Networks and should be operational in 2021. The cable will be located between Lisbon and Cape Town. According to Google, the cable has twenty times the capacity of other cables that go to the area. The company uses space division multiplexing for this. It’s also Google’s first cable to support fiber-level optical switching, making it easier to run taps to different African countries. The first country where this is happening is Nigeria. The cable will arrive there in the large coastal city of Lagos.

Google currently does not have its own data centers in Africa. The Equiano cable may be a first step towards eventually building it there. The company is also experimenting with alternative methods to bring the internet to hard-to-reach parts of the world, such as Project Loon balloons.

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