Internet in SA could soon be cheaper

Speaking during the official unveiling and rebranding of the company plus the officially opening of Riverview Filling Stations, was TotalEnergies Eswatini Managing Director (MD) Nalini Naicker, who said the transition was a necessary and imperative development.

Naicker said their transition from Total to TotalEnergies was a major development to the company as they were currently working on moving towards the use of renewable energy.

“Energy is reinventing itself, Total is transforming and becoming TotalEnergies. Energy is life, we all need it and it is a source of progress,” she said.

The MD said the reason they embarked on a name change and rebranding

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APE TOWN – The Equiano subsea internet cable that landed ashore in Melkbosstrand outside Cape Town earlier this year could cut South Africa’s internet costs by around 20 per cent, according to Google.

Equiano arrived in South Africa in early August, its final destination after already having landed in Togo, Nigeria and Namibia. The submarine internet cable, stretching 15 000km from Portugal to South Africa along the west coast of the continent, features 12 fibre pairs and a design capacity of 150Tbps.

Equiano has 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region, according to Nitin Gajria, the managing director of Google in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“There’s a huge positive knock-on effect, in terms of digital economies, job generation... but, at the end of the day, for the end-user, the knockon effect of this (Equiano) is faster internet and lower cost internet,” said Gajria on Wednesday at the AfricaTech festival held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

“So, depending on which country you’re in, what geography you’re in, and the various partnerships along the way, this would be somewhere in the range of 20 per cent cheaper internet locally.”