Browsing: subsea cable africa

In the midst of the pandemic, Facebook[1] (and partners) announced 2Africa[2] a new subsea cable. About the same time last year, Google also announced a subsea cable called Equaino[3]. Both cables have been presented as (better) connecting Africa to the world – that is factually inaccurate. The diagrams below by Steve Song[4] under the auspices of Many Possibilities[5] gives you a historical account of Africa been connected to the world by subsea cables since 2001 through SAT3[6] – a consortium of majority Africa owned telecom operators[7]. As per the second diagram Google and Facebook are building the 19^th and 20^th cables which would be live in Q4 2021 and Q4 2023 respectively. Hence Facebook and Google cannot be connecting Africa to the world in 2020 – at best their two new cables could serve as redundancy to the existing …