Google’s Equiano submarine cable, which will run from Portugal to the west coast of Africa, has finally arrived on the continent after its launch in 2019.
The company’s latest undersea cable will connect Europe to Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa and St. Helena to bring faster and more reliable internet to Africa.
People around the world rely on Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Maps, and other Google products to keep in touch with friends and family, find directions, reach new customers, and more. In the next five years, 300 million people in Africa will be online, and the Equiano cable is part of the search giant’s ongoing commitment to improve connectivity and bring the benefits of the technology to more Africans.
In the original blog entry In announcing Equiano, Google Cloud stated that it is the “first undersea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber pair level,” as opposed to the traditional wavelength-level switching approach. This not only greatly simplifies the allocation of cable capacity, but also gives the organization the flexibility to add and move it to different sites as needed. One of the reasons the company was able to build and deploy its latest undersea cable so quickly is that Equiano is fully funded by Google.
Boosting Togo’s digital economy
Although the Equiano submarine cable has now made it down the west coast of Africa to Togo, it still has some way to go to make it to Cape Town in South Africa at the bottom of the continent. Nevertheless, the arrival of Equiano in Togo is an important step in the further development of the country.
According to a recent economic impact assessment carried out by Africa Practice and Genesis Analytics, Equiano is expected to result in faster internet speeds, improved user experience and lower internet prices in Togo. In fact, internet speeds in the country are expected to more than double from 10Mbps in 2021 to 21Mbps in 2025, while retail internet prices are expected to fall by 14 percent over the same period.
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More connectivity and faster internet will also create jobs and the economic assessment predicts that Equiano should indirectly create 37,000 new jobs in Togo as a result of the growth of its digital economy.
In addition to improving the resiliency of Google’s network, the company’s other partners can leverage and benefit from Equiano’s capacity. The search giant is working with several telecom companies in Togo, including Société d’infrastructures numériques (SIN) and CSquared, to ensure the cable can reach more businesses and end-users across the country and continent.
Equiano is expected to be operational later this year, and the new undersea cable will have about 20 times more network capacity than the last cable Google built to serve the region.
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