Bringing Africa up to high-speed internet
Facebook and Google are building new undersea cables that should provide better bandwidth and cut prices
Two of the world’s biggest technology companies, Google and Facebook, are each building a giant new undersea internet cable system that will bring bandwidth that has, until now, been unheard of, to Africa within the next 36 months.
The two cable systems, Google’s Equiano and Facebook-backed 2Africa, promise to provide the latest in cutting-edge fibre-optic backbone technologies to service providers and telecommunications operators across the continent, including SA.
Each cable is expected to deliver at least three times the capacity of the whole of the undersea fibre infrastructure that is now around the continent — systems such as Seacom and Eassy on Africa’s east coast and Wacs, Ace and Sacs in the west.
Equiano, which is being built by France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, promises a design capacity (current theoretical maximum throughput) of 150Tbit/s. That’s about 8-million times faster than a typical home fibre connection, assuming 20Mbit/s. To put it another way, fast enough to transfer 6,400 full-HD movies every second, assuming 3GB a movie.
Equiano’s design capacity will go even higher as optical transmission technologies improve.
Specialist cable-laying ships have already begun the laborious work of deploying Equiano’s cable along the ocean floor, with the system eventually expected to connect SA from a landing station near
Cape Town to a station in Lisbon, Portugal, from where it will connect onward to the fibre internet backbone of Europe. It will have “branches” to Namibia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria, and landing stations in those countries.
The cable will also bring subsea internet capacity for the first time to the remote island of St Helena. It’s the biggest news event on the island since an international airport was opened there in 2016.
The 2Africa cable, which will also be built by Alcatel Submarine Networks, is even more ambitious. Unlike Equiano, which will connect only Africa’s west coast, the 180Tbit/s (current expected design capacity) 2Africa system will encircle the continent. And a recent expansion, called Pearls, will extend it to Pakistan and India through the Arabian Sea.
When it’s completed in late
2023 or early 2024, 2Africa will be the world’s longest submarine cable system, at more than 45,000km. It will also have many more landing stations in Africa than Equiano, including three in
SA, with a spur into Gqeberha, giving the Eastern Cape its first subsea landing station. 2Africa will also come ashore near Durban and Cape Town.
Other than Facebook, investors in 2Africa include some of the world’s biggest telecoms firms: MTN Group (SA), China Mobile, Vodafone Group (UK) and Orange (France).
Like other, smaller subsea systems that have been deployed around Africa in recent years, the flood of international bandwidth that Equiano and 2Africa will bring to African markets (at least to those that have liberalised their telecoms industries, like SA) should drive
down prices, improve internet speeds and lead to a wave of investment in data centre infrastructure for cloud-based services.
At a global media event last week, Facebook provided more details about the 2Africa system, including some of the technologies it will use.
It says portions of the project will use a new aluminium conductor system, replacing traditional copper conductors, which will make it more economical to build.
2Africa will also have floating repeater stations to deliver power to the cable.
The capacity of subsea cables has historically been limited by the amount of electricity that can be delivered from the shore to a series of repeaters. To solve this challenge, engineers are working on buoys that can deliver power to the repeaters from the middle of the ocean. “We’re exploring more sustainable ways to do this, harnessing a combination of wave energy converters and solar panels,” Facebook says.
Equiano and 2Africa will be open systems, meaning regulated telecoms operators and service providers will be able to buy access to them. The idea is to drive down bandwidth prices for end users. This is, of course, in the interests of Facebook and Google, which want their online services in the hands of as many people in Africa as possible. Selling eyeballs is, after all, their business model.
Both companies have faced isolated criticism about their plans, with suggestions that they’re recolonising Africa. Google also drew some accusation of insensitivity for using the name “Equiano”, after slave-turned-abolitionist Olaudah Equiano.
But the construction of the new cable systems has been widely welcomed by internet service providers and other communications companies for the impact they will have on helping develop Africa’s internet ecosystem and getting the continent’s 1.2-billionplus people connected to the world and engaged in the global online marketplace.