Seacom buys bandwidth on Google’s massive undersea cable

3 years ago 1

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Seacom has launched services on the Google-owned Equiano undersea cable, promising private lines with latencies of 110 milliseconds between South Africa and Europe.

The company says this is the fastest direct route between the continents.

Seacom was the first independent undersea cable to connect South Africa to Europe, with landings along the East coast of the African continent.

First launched in 2009, Seacom’s cable helped kickstart a home broadband revolution in South Africa and has received several upgrades in the intervening years. By 2020, Seacom had announced that it had lit 3.2 terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity.

The company has also diversified from purely offering international undersea cable capacity to a more general network services provider.

Equiano landed in South Africa in August 2022. Three local network operators were known to have bought capacity on the cable: Liquid, Openserve, and WIOCC.

In addition to its landing station in Melkbosstrand, Cape Town, the cable also has landing stations in Rupert’s Bay, St. Helena; Lomé, Togo; Lagos, Nigeria; and Swakopmund, Namibia.

From these stations, branching units will extend connectivity to other African countries.

Equiano stretches 15,000km along the West coast of Africa and has a design capacity of 144Tbps, dwarfing the cables that have faithfully served the African continent so far.

However, it only briefly held onto the title of biggest cable on the continent, as the Facebook-backed 2Africa cable has promised a design capacity of 180Tbps.

Operators buy capacity on Equiano by buying whole fibre pairs on the cable. Each fibre pair currently offers up to 12Tbps of capacity, and there are twelve pairs.

“This launch results from years of project negotiations and planning, driven by a goal to be ready to offer quality service to our customers from day one,” said Seacom group chief digital officer Prenesh Padayachee.

“The Equiano subsea cable represents a new stage in Africa’s digital transformation, meeting Africa’s growing data requirements, enabling cross-border digital trade, and offering citizens and enterprises new opportunities.”

Seacom said this follows extensive work to support the new connection, including upgrades to its transmission and IP network locally and internationally.

Infinera is Seacom’s equipment provider.

As part of the service available to wholesale and enterprise clients from March, Seacom will offer an express route from Cape Town to Lisbon.

“The Equiano subsea cable serves as an alternative route to and from the continent,” stated Padayachee.

“This means we can accommodate even greater volumes of data traffic and ensure greater uptime availability.”