3 thoughts on “2Africa subsea cable system adds 4 new branches”

1. Average international Internet traffic rose by 48% in 2020, between long-term patterns of regional growth pushed further by pandemic-induced shifts in online behavior, says TeleGeography.

   Between them, Facebook and Google owner Alphabet are behind about four-fifths of investments at the moment in transatlantic data connections.

   Their joint system is set to link countries as far-flung as Nigeria and Angola with Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Guam, the Philippines and Indonesia. Together with another recently announced link to the Canary Islands, there will altogether be 35 connection-landings in 26 countries.

   A 12,000 km cable called Apricot will race around Asia, while two further transpacific subsea cables, dubbed Bifrost and Echo, then will connect Singapore with the US west coast. Echo and Bifrost are expected to increase transpacific capacity by some 70%.

   Facebook, Alphabet and their other partners, including Vodafone, Orange, MTN Group and Telecom Egypt, are aiming to have the entire 37,000-kilometer cable system in place by 2024. Its scale is bigger than the combined capacity of all current sea cables in Africa. The cable, of which Alcatel Submarine Networks has started constructing the first segments and repeater units, is designed to have an initial capacity of over 190 terabits per second.

   Under the sea

   Altogether there are about 400 subsea cables globally, which are responsible for nearly all the voice and Internet connections between countries.

   Facebook, which is relying on fast-growing countries like Indonesia for its future growth as it plateaus in mature western markets, first announced its plans for a new undersea cable in May 2020. It has since gained new partners, scale and connectors. It’s a successor to the 1990s craze in laying fiber-optic cables under the sea, on which telephone operators spent over $20 billion amid the dot-com boom.

   Drawing on that earlier engineering knowledge, the 2Africa cable system will be buried 50% deeper than older systems and routed around known areas of subsea disturbance. It also will use Wavelength Selective Switching for the first time in Africa, an optical switching technology its designers say will give it more flexibility in managing capacity.

   The cable system also constitutes a US soft power play, linking these countries together and to America, not China. An earlier draft, called the Pacific Light Cable, also involved Facebook and Google and would have included Hong Kong as well. Washington, however, put its foot down over the Hong Kong leg, arguing it exposed the entire system’s data to misuse by China.

   https://www.lightreading.com/facebook-google-plan-nigeria-us-subsea-cables/d/d-id/771498?

2. Today, Google Cloud announced Apricot, a new subsea cable that will connect Singapore, Japan, Guam, the Philippines, Taiwan and Indonesia.

   Earlier this year, Google Cloud announced the Echo subsea cable, which will connect the U.S., Singapore, Guam and Indonesia. The Echo and Apricot cables are complementary submarine systems that will offer benefits with multiple paths in and out of Asia, including unique routes through southern Asia, significantly higher resiliency and lower latency.

   Apricot joins Google’s global network of subsea cables, including Curie, Dunant, Equiano, Firmina and Grace Hopper, and consortium cables like JGA, INDIGO and Havfrue. In total, Google has investments in 18 subsea cables, alongside our 27 cloud regions and 82 zones around the world.

3. Google, Meta, Microsoft & Amazon use 66% of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity! The four tech giants increasingly dominate the internet’s critical cable infrastructure

   Fiber-optic cable, which carries 95% of the world’s international internet traffic, links up pretty much all of the world’s data centers, those vast server warehouses where the computing happens that transforms all those 1s and 0s into our experience of the internet.

   Where those fiber-optic connections link up countries across the oceans, they consist almost entirely of cables running underwater—some 1.3 million kilometers (or more than 800,000 miles) of bundled glass threads that make up the actual, physical international internet. And until recently, the overwhelming majority of the undersea fiber-optic cable being installed was controlled and used by telecommunications companies and governments. Today, that’s no longer the case.

   In less than a decade, four tech giants— Microsoft, Google parent Alphabet, Meta (formerly Facebook ) and Amazon —have become by far the dominant users of undersea-cable capacity. Before 2012, the share of the world’s undersea fiber-optic capacity being used by those companies was less than 10%. Today, that figure is about 66%.

   By building their own cables, the tech giants are saving themselves money over time that they would have to pay other cable operators. That means the tech companies don’t need to operate their cables at a profit for the investment to make financial sense.
   The ability of these companies to vertically integrate all the way down to the level of the physical infrastructure of the internet itself reduces their cost for delivering everything from Google Search and Facebook’s social networking services to Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud services. It also widens the moat between themselves and any potential competitors.

   “You have to imagine this investment will ultimately make them more dominant in their industries, because they can provide services at ever-lower costs,” says Mr. Meltzer.

   https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-amazon-meta-and-microsoft-weave-a-fiber-optic-web-of-power-11642222824

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