Seacom buys fibre pair on Google’s massive undersea cable
March 15th 2023
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 with a 1.28 terabits per second (Tbps) design capacity, Seacom’s cable helped kickstart a home broadband revolution in South Africa.
The cable has received several upgrades in the intervening years, and Seacom says it has lit 4.2Tbps of capacity so far.
The company has also diversified from purely offering international undersea cable capacity to a more general network services provider.
“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.
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 initially had a design capacity of 144Tbps, dwarfing the cables that have faithfully served the African continent so far.
However, it only briefly held the title of biggest cable on the continent, as the Facebook-backed 2Africa cable has promised a design capacity of 180Tbps.
Not to be outdone, Equiano has upped the maximum capacity supported by each of the cable’s twelve fibre pairs to 16Tbps, for a total of 196Tbps.
Unlike other major cable systems that have landed in South Africa, operators don’t buy capacity but rather entire fibre pairs.
As part of the service available to wholesale and enterprise clients from March, Seacom said it would offer an express route from Cape Town to Lisbon.
“The Equiano subsea cable serves as an alternative route to and from the continent,” said Padayachee.
“This means we can accommodate even greater volumes of data traffic and ensure greater uptime availability.”
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