In a blog post over the weekend, Google introduced plans for yet another private subsea cable system. The Equiano cable will hug the western coastline of Africa, and is named after the Nigerian author and activist Olaudah Equiano.
Equiano’s endpoints will be in Lisbon, Portugal, and Cape Town, South Africa, with a stop in Lagos, Nigeria. The map also suggests it will have eight other branching units which could bring it ashore in many other markets as well. It will leverage SDM technology and optical switching at the fiber pair level to bring 20x the capacity of any existing cable on this route.
Assuming Google Follows through, Equiano will be Google’s third private subsea cable project. The other two are Dunant (USA/France) and Curie (US/Chile), and of course Google is part of a dozen or so other existing and planned subsea cable systems around the world as well. They’ve come a long way since pushing through the transpacific Unity cable system, eh? Hard to believe that was almost a decade ago now.
Alcatel Submarine Networks will build the Equiano cable, this expected to be complete sometime in 2021. There’s not much in the way of that deadline since we don’t have to wait for a consortium to work itself out or anything.
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Categories: Undersea cables
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hmm the first subsea cable using “Space division multiplexing”? I guess I’ll need to look that up, but it does sound noteworthy.